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When America began to emerge as a world power at the end of the nineteenth century, Italy was a young nation, recently unified. The technological advances brought about by electricity and the combustion engine were vastly speeding up the capacity of news, ideas, and artefacts to travel internationally. Furthermore, improved literacy and social reforms had produced an Italian working class with increased time, money, and education. At the turn of the century, if Italy's ruling elite continued the tradition of viewing Paris as a model of sophistication and good taste, millions of lowly-educated Italians began to dream of America, and many bought a transatlantic ticket to migrate there. By the ...
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...
This book brings together literary critics, political historians, historians of literature, cinema and theatre and cultural sociologists, to elucidate a fundamental area of enquiry into modern Italian history: the nature and scope of relations between the state and the cultural sphere.
Due to its strategic Mediterranean position, Italy is a crossroad of complex transnational movements, a unique context for the study of contemporary migration. This book brings together scholars from migration studies, linguistics, media, literature and film studies, as well practitioners and activists, to explore Italy as a destination country.
"Elio Vittorini holds a major position in 20th-century Italian literature thanks to both his narrative production and his activity as editor and militant intellectual. This work aims to present the English-speaking reader with a comprehensive study of the author, his times and his work. Particular attention has been paid to the interconnection between Vittorini's work as a fiction writer and his political commitment which saw him move from revolutionary fascism to communism, to independent left-wing militancy. The combination of extensive archival research with a re-appraisal of his fiction and of his editorial activity provides a full picture reaching beyond the traditional restricted view of Vittorini as the anti-fascist author of ""Conversazione in Sicilia""."
This collection takes a cross-disciplinary, transnational approach and gathers together essays from a range of subjects including linguistics, film studies, folk music, oral and written narrative, and history, which provide new comparative perspectives on the questions surrounding the mutual influence between Italian and U.S. cultures. The volume also showcases new research - quantitative, interpretative, and archival - which contributes to the study of cultural contact. It therefore offers new evidence to answer a question which has long been pivotal in various disciplines and research fields (from historical linguistics to cultural anthropology) - namely, how and to what extent cultural contact can affect long-term historical change?
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...
Recent work on the cultural history of modern Italy has radically challenged received opinion about the relationship of state and culture during the twentieth century. In this rich interdisciplinary book the complex interactions and negotiations of control arising from this state-culture connection are elucidated by way of case studies of major authors, filmmakers and artists and their encounters with censorship, patronage and other forms of direct state intervention; analytical surveys of different periods, media and culture industries; and through an examination of such key issues as Fascist censorship, the Resistance and its imprint in the collective memory, the introduction of television in the 1950s, and 1970's terrorism.
Images of southern Italy as a place of arrival for migrants with different origins and backgrounds have in recent years proliferated in Italian media as well as in contemporary Italian literature and cinema. The unprecedented perspective which presents the mezzogiorno as a place where people arrive, and not only as a place of departure, constitutes a major change in the collective imaginary on the region and fosters new engagements with its migratory histories. This book presents one of the first studies to focus entirely, through in-depth readings of a range of contemporary literary and cinematic texts, on the representation of contemporary migration to southern Italy, and on the concomitan...
Postmodern Ethics offers a new perspective on debates surrounding the role of the intellectual in Italian society, and provides an original reading of two important Italian contemporary writers, Leonardo Sciascia and Antonio Tabucchi. It examines the ways in which the two writers use literature to engage with their socio-political environment in a climate informed by the doubts and scepticism of postmodernism, after traditional forms of impegno had been abandoned. Postmodern Ethics explores ways in which Tabucchi and Sciascia further their engagement through embracing the very factors which problematized traditional committed writing, such as the absence of fixed truths, the inability of lan...