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The history of totalitarian states bears witness to the fact that literature and print media can be manipulated and made into vehicles of mass deception. Censorship and Literature in Fascist Italy is the first comprehensive account of how the Fascists attempted to control Italy's literary production. Guido Bonsaver looks at how the country's major publishing houses and individual authors responded to the new cultural directives imposed by the Fascists. Throughout his study, Bonsaver uses rare and previously unexamined materials to shed light on important episodes in Italy's literary history, such as relationships between the regime and particular publishers, as well as individual cases invol...
Medardo Rosso (1858–1928) is one of the most original and influential figures in the history of modern art, and this book is the first historically substantiated critical account of his life and work. An innovative sculptor, photographer, and draftsman, Rosso was vital in paving the way for the transition from the academic forms of sculpture that persisted in the nineteenth century to the development of new and experimental forms in the twentieth. His antimonumental, antiheroic work reflected alienation in the modern experience yet also showed deep feeling for interactions between self and other. Rosso’s art was also transnational: he refused allegiance to a single culture or artistic he...
"Italy has been made; now we need to make the Italians," goes a familiar Italian saying. Mussolini was the first head of state to include women in this mandate. How the fascist dictatorship defined the place of women in modern Italy and how women experienced the Duce's rule are the subjects of Victoria de Grazia's new work. De Grazia draws on an array of sources—memoirs and novels, the images, songs, and events of mass culture, as well as government statistics and archival reports. She offers a broad yet detailed characterization of Italian women's ambiguous and ambivalent experience of a regime that promised modernity, yet denied women emancipation. Always attentive to the great diversity...
Examines Europe's first significant national policies on social welfare in the late nineteenth century, which had major implications for state-society relations.
National Cultures and Foreign Narratives charts the pathways through which foreign literature in translation has arrived in Italy during the first half of the twentieth century. To show the contribution translations made to shaping an Italian national culture, it draws on a wealth of archival material made available in English for the first time.
How would the history of an urban area look if water were at the center of analysis? Water in the Making of a Socio-Natural Landscape explores the transition from early modern to modern water management in late nineteenth-century Rome. It merges local water management with national water policies aimed at promoting irrigated agriculture, industrial processes, and public health. It investigates perceptions and conceptualisations of water, changes in the water law, engineering projects, medical knowledge and practices, value of water in different productions, and needs and uses of local stakeholders. From which derives that water infrastructures are the complex outcome of the clash between dif...
In the 1930s translation became a key issue in the cultural politics of the Fascist regime due to the fact that Italy was publishing more translations than any other country in the world. Making use of extensive archival research, the author of this new study examines this 'invasion of translations' through a detailed statistical analysis of the translation market. The book shows how translations appeared to challenge official claims about the birth of a Fascist culture and cast Italy in a receptive role that did not tally with Fascist notions of a dominant culture extending its influence abroad. The author shows further that the commercial impact of this invasion provoked a sustained reacti...
Did religion disappear with modernization and the secularization reforms that changed the relation between religion and state throughout the European empires and nation states from late nineteenth century onwards? Or was religion rather transformed becoming a part of the new social and national imaginaries on the road from European empires to African, Middle Eastern, European Union- and Post-Soviet nation states? What are the historical roots behind the divisions of state, church and education that characterized the late nineteenth and during the twentieth century? What has been the role of education in this context, both with regard to political reforms targeting the education systems and w...
This book explores an important moment in Italian women’s theatre and cultural history: plays written for all-women casts between 1946 and the mid-1960s, authored for the most part by women and performed exclusively by women. Because they featured only female roles, they concentrated on aspects of specifically women’s experience, be it their spirituality, their future lives as wives and mothers, their present lives as workers or students, or their relationships with friends, sisters and mothers. Most often performed in a Catholic environment, they were meant to both entertain and educate, reflecting the specific issues that both performers and spectators had to confront in the years between the end of the war and the beginning of the economic miracle. Drawing on material never before researched, Educational Theatre for Women in Post-World War II Italy: A Stage of Their Own recovers the life and works of forgotten women playwrights while also discussing the role models that educational theatre offered to the young Italian women coming of age in the post-war years.