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Broken Time, Fragmented Space: A Cultural Map for Post-war Italy examines how the artists and intellectuals of post-war Italy dealt with the 'shameful' heritage of their fascist upbringing and education by trying to craft a new cultural identity for themselves and the country. The continuities between the culture of the fascist and post-fascist periods were, however, far greater than what intellectuals were ready to admit, creating an uncomfortable, sometimes schizophrenic relation to time, as a painful urge to erase the past. Drawing on a variety of critical approaches, Torriglia investigates the efforts to reconstruct a personal as well as a collective self by analyzing both canonical and lesser-known cinematic and literary texts. Organized around four main themes - the use of language, the interaction between personal and public spheres, the perceptual categories of history and memory, and the reconstruction of the female identity - the study also includes historical introductions and sociological commentary that provides an extensive and captivating picture of the cultural production in 1950s Italy, a period that has not yet been extensively studied.
Examines how the artists and intellectuals of post-war Italy dealt with the 'shameful' heritage of their fascist upbringing and education by trying to craft a new cultural identity for themselves and the country.
This collection of essays, the first of its kind in English or Italian, examines de Cespedes's major texts, asking how the author wrote against Fascism and beyond it. The essays engage current interpretive and heuristic tools and take on a matrix of issues ranging from semiotic to psychoanalytic, from feminist to historical, from a concern for mass culture to cultural studies.
Contributions by Nathaniel Brennan, Luca Caminati, Silvia Carlorosi, Caroline Eades, Saverio Giovacchini, Paula Halperin, Neepa Majumdar, Mariano Mestman, Hamid Naficy, Sada Niang, Masha Salazkina, Sarah Sarzynski, Robert Sklar, and Vito Zagarrio Intellectual, cultural, and film historians have long considered neorealism the founding block of post-World War II Italian cinema. Neorealism, the traditional story goes, was an Italian film style born in the second postwar period and aimed at recovering the reality of Italy after the sugarcoated moving images of fascism. Lasting from 1945 to the early 1950s, neorealism produced world-renowned masterpieces such as Roberto Rossellini's Roma, città ...
The Second World War wreaked unprecedented devastation throughout Europe, necessitating monumental reconstruction efforts that burdened not only governments, but the lives of ordinary citizens. War, Massacre, and Recovery in Central Italy, 1943-1948 examines this transitional period in the province of Arezzo by detailing the daily experiences of civilians through the traumas of war and the difficulties of recovery. Studying the aftermath of war in a new and insightful way, Victoria C. Belco shifts the perspective from the national to the local level. With this localized focus, she provides valuable insight into the ways in which civilians coped with an overwhelming range of problems - from adjusting to Allied occupation and widespread displacement to rampant unemployment and the restructuring of local administrations and institutions after fascism. Recreating the post-war atmosphere of disorder, need, and political upheaval, Belco shows how the competing community interests caused social fragmentations that impeded change, while the unity of a shared past prevented civil war.
This book seeks to redefine, recontextualize, and reassess Italian neorealism - an artistic movement characterized by stories set among the poor and working class - through innovative close readings and comparative analysis.
This study considers the collaboration between Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman in light of the neorealist aesthetic, re-examining the director's immediate postwar works in relation to the contemporary discussion on Italian national identity.
Discloses the richness of ideas and sheds light on the controversy that characterized the transition from fascism to democracy, examining authors, works and memories that were subsequently silenced by Cold War politics. How a shared memory of Fascism and its cultural heritage took shape is still today the most disputed question of modern Italy, crossing the boundaries between academic and public discourse. Against Redemption concentrates on the historical period in which disagreement was at its highest: the transition between the downfall of Mussolini in July 1943 and the victory of the Christian Democrats over the Left in the 1948 general elections. By dispelling the silence around the rang...
Examines the reputation of the Hungarian musician Béla Bartók (1881-1945) as an antifascist hero. This book examines the reputation of the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók (1881-1945) as an antifascist hero and beacon of freedom. Following Bartok's reception in Italy from the early twentieth century, through Mussolini's fascist regime, and into the early Cold War, Palazzetti explores the connexions between music, politics and diplomacy. The wider context of this study also offers glimpses into broader themes such as fascist cultural policies, cultural resistance, and the ambivalent political usage of modernist music. The book argues that the 'Bartókian Wave' occurring in Italy after the S...
Families, Lovers, and their Letters takes us into the passionate hearts and minds of ordinary people caught in the heartbreak of transatlantic migration. It examines the experiences of Italian migrants to Canada and their loved ones left behind in Italy following the Second World War, when the largest migration of Italians to Canada took place. In a micro-analysis of 400 private letters, including three collections that incorporate letters from both sides of the Atlantic, Sonia Cancian provides new evidence on the bidirectional flow of communication during migration. She analyzes how kinship networks functioned as a means of support and control through the flow of news, objects, and persons; how gender roles in productive and reproductive spheres were reinforced as a means of coping with separation; and how the emotional impact of both temporary and permanent separation was expressed during the migration process. Cancian also examines the love letter as a specific form of epistolary exchange, a first in Italian immigrant historiography, revealing the powerful effect that romantic love had on the migration experience.