The Mafia in Italian Lives and Literature

Pickering-Iazzi uses an array of cultural documents from 1990 to the present to examine the myths, values, codes of behaviour, and relationships produced by the Italian mafia through a wide cross-disciplinary lens.

Robin Pickering-Iazzi is a professor in the Department of French, Italian, and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her previous works include The Mafia in Italian Lives and Literature and Mafia and Outlaw Stories, both published by University of Toronto Press.

"In her detailed and insightful study of the Italian Mafia since 1990, Robin Pickering-Iazzi guides readers through multilayered, cultural, and sociological narratives by women…Her book gives scholars and students new tools and a set of original theoretical approaches to use in contemplating Southern Italian culture and its landscape. It offers a refreshing approach to understanding the geographies of organized crime and those who fight against it."

Amy Boylan:

‘This book provides an exciting analysis of mafia narratives… It will be of great value to scholars interested in Italian and comparative literature, Gender Studies, social justice, Mafia Studies, Trauma Studies, and Sicilian identity, to name just a few.’

Dana Renga, Department of French and Italian, The Ohio State University:

“Robin Pickering-Iazzi is in the vanguard of critical scholarship on space, literature, and gender in the context of the Italian mafia. Her book promises to change the way we think about the representation of criminality.”

Norma Bouchard, Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, University of Connecticut:

“Written in lucid, captivating prose, The Mafia in Italian Lives and Literature is a fascinating account of the embattled geography of mafia and anti-mafia forces in Italy from the 1980s to the present. An innovative contribution to our understanding of gendered discourse on mafia and anti-mafia cultures, it will appeal to scholars of twentieth-century Italian literature and cultural studies, trauma and memory studies, gender studies, and digital humanities.”