The Nancy Staub Publications Award-winning book The Sicilian Puppet Theater of Agrippino Manteo (1884-1947): The Paladins of France in America by Jo Ann Cavallo has just been released in paperback edition.

This study reconstructs the history of the Manteo family marionette theater in New York City, provides translations of eight selected plays and 270 extant summaries, and offers comparative analyses uncovering how Agrippino Manteo’s scripts creatively adapt Italian Renaissance chivalric poems and nineteenth-century prose compilations.

Praise
We are fortunate indeed that the Manteo family has preserved written scripts of Italian puppet theater in America and that Jo Ann Cavallo is able to provide a context in the history of literature for what was performed daily for the Italian community on the streets of New York in the 1920s and 1930s.

—Professor Charles Ross, Purdue University, USA

This work will be of interest to students of Sicilian culture and of the art of puppetry, as well as to scholars of narratology, intrigued by the appeal of storytelling as such.

—Arthuriana

About the Author
Jo Ann Cavallo (Ph.D., Yale, 1987), Professor of Italian at Columbia University, has published widely on Italian chivalric epic, including The World beyond Europe in the Romance Epics of Boiardo and Ariosto and The Romance Epics of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso: From Public Duty to Private Pleasure.

About Anthem Press
Anthem Press is a leading medium-sized independent academic, professional and trade publisher in established and emerging social sciences, business/law and humanities fields of study with a strong international and interdisciplinary focus.