La tesi riguarda il carteggio tra la scrittrice, critica letteraria e attivista politica americana Mary McCarthy e il saggista e critico teatrale italiano Nicola Chiaromonte: uno scambio epistolare, il loro, tuttora rimasto inedito nonostante il crescente numero di pubblicazioni riguardanti i due autori. La corrispondenza mantenuta con gli amici più stretti è da considerarsi un elemento fondamentale per far luce sugli aspetti più intimi della vita e della creazione artistica di Mary McCarthy: in particolare, questo epistolario svela il lato più umano e personale dell’autrice (raramente mostrato in pubblico) e la devozione e il rispetto che provava verso colui che considerava come suo mentore, critico e amico. Gli stessi sentimenti traspaiono dalle parole di Nicola Chiaromonte, tanto austero e misurato nel suo lavoro quanto scherzoso e appassionato con gli amici più cari. La tesi si compone di due parti principali. La breve introduzione generale è seguita da una prima parte di carattere storico-narrativo, in cui le biografie di Mary McCarthy e di Nicola Chiaromonte si alternano fino ad arrivare al momento fondamentale del loro incontro, a partire dal quale le loro esperienze si intrecciano negli eventi che li videro coinvolti. La seconda parte della tesi è invece il carteggio vero e proprio: 115 tra lettere, telegrammi e biglietti, corredati di note critiche al fine di permetterne una maggiore comprensione. / The dissertation deals with the correspondence between the writer, literary critic and American political activist Mary McCarthy and the Italian essayist and theater critic Nicola Chiaromonte: an epistolary exchange, their, still unpublished despite the growing number of publications concerning the two authors. The correspondence maintained with close friends is to be considered a fundamental element to shed light on the most intimate aspects of Mary McCarthy's life and artistic creation: in particular, this correspondence reveals the author's more human and personal side (rarely shown in public) and the devotion and respect he felt towards the one he considered as her mentor, critic and friend. The same feelings are reflected in the words of Nicola Chiaromonte, so austere and measured in his work as playful and passionate with his closest friends. The thesis consists of two main parts. The brief general introduction is followed by a first part of historical-narrative nature, in which the biographies of Mary McCarthy and Nicola Chiaromonte alternate up to the fundamental moment of their meeting, starting from which their experiences are intertwined in the events who saw them involved. The second part of the thesis is instead the actual correspondence: 115 among letters, telegrams and tickets, supplied with critical notes in order to allow a better understanding.

<p>A commonly held assumption among literary critics is that the motif of the European journey is exhausted in American literature in the post-World-War-II period. Challenging this view, the present study claims that the Old World journey narrative lives on, but in new guises, and that it continues to be a forum for the discussion of American national identity. Studying four novels about Americans traveling to Europe – William Styron’s Set This House on Fire (1960), Mary McCarthy’s Birds of America (1971), John A. Williams’s The Man Who Cried I Am (1967) and Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1973) – this thesis examines the ways in which the European journey is utilized for a questioning of “America.” Informed by the political debates of their time, which lead, for example, to the displacement of hegemonic ideologies such as nationalism, they share a critical stance vis-à-vis the conventional construction of national identity. They represent, however, different strands of the contemporary political counterculture; while the first two texts view national identity from the center of American society, addressing a moral and an ideological/intellectual critique, respectively, the last two represent marginal perspectives, that of the African American and feminist protest movements. The function of the European setting in the four novels is also scrutinized: in all of them the European setting provides the backdrop for a story that deals, almost exclusively, with American culture; it serves in a variety of ways, for example as a many-facetted stage, an experimental ground, or a zone of liberation. The Coda sketches recent developments in the 1980s and 1990s, finding the motif of initiation and the figure of the independent warm-hearted American girl to persist and the myth of American innocence to continue to be contested. </p>

A commonly held assumption among literary critics is that the motif of the European journey is exhausted in American literature in the post-World-War-II period. Challenging this view, the present study claims that the Old World journey narrative lives on, but in new guises, and that it continues to be a forum for the discussion of American national identity. Studying four novels about Americans traveling to Europe – William Styron’s Set This House on Fire (1960), Mary McCarthy’s Birds of America (1971), John A. Williams’s The Man Who Cried I Am (1967) and Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1973) – this thesis examines the ways in which the European journey is utilized for a questioning of “America.” Informed by the political debates of their time, which lead, for example, to the displacement of hegemonic ideologies such as nationalism, they share a critical stance vis-à-vis the conventional construction of national identity. They represent, however, different strands of the contemporary political counterculture; while the first two texts view national identity from the center of American society, addressing a moral and an ideological/intellectual critique, respectively, the last two represent marginal perspectives, that of the African American and feminist protest movements. The function of the European setting in the four novels is also scrutinized: in all of them the European setting provides the backdrop for a story that deals, almost exclusively, with American culture; it serves in a variety of ways, for example as a many-facetted stage, an experimental ground, or a zone of liberation. The Coda sketches recent developments in the 1980s and 1990s, finding the motif of initiation and the figure of the independent warm-hearted American girl to persist and the myth of American innocence to continue to be contested.