My article “Thomas Wolfe's Passage to England: A
Ghostly Account of a Real Voyage” has just been published in The Thomas Wolfe
Review, Vol. 41, Nos. 1 & 2. Here is a brief extract:
“I recently received my MA from Sapienza
University of Rome. My thesis was a translation into Italian and a critical
commentary of Thomas Wolfe’s Passage to
England. That was not my first encounter with that text, however, as I had
already read it during the second year of my BA and since then I had been
fascinated with it. When considering ideas for my MA thesis, I thought that because I wanted to make a translation, it had
to be Passage to England. A series of
sketches written in 1924 during an ocean crossing from New York to Tilbury, the
book was published only in 1998 by the Thomas Wolfe Society and is hardly Wolfe’s
most popular or most accomplished work. Nonetheless I always felt that Passage to England had something unique
and idiosyncratic and that despite a certain amount of editing it was arguably more
genuinely Wolfean than later and more renowned works such as Look Homeward, Angel, which was heavily
modified by Scribner’s Sons editor
Maxwell E. Perkins, or the posthumous The Web and the Rock and You
Can’t Go Home Again, which Harper & Brothers editor Edward
Aswell rearranged from a single manuscript.
As
a matter of fact, while the text possesses characteristic traits such as a
fragmented narrative form, an interweave of reality and fiction and the lack of
a definite plot, it also tackles and anticipates a whole series of ideas and
issues that Wolfe would deal with, albeit to a lesser extent, in subsequent
books …”
