Books in the Italian Modernities series

The recent emergence and increasing visibility of Islam as Italy's second religion is an issue of undeniable importance. It has generated an intense and often polarized debate that has involved all the cultural, political and religious institutions of the country and some of its most vocal and controversial cultural figures. This study examines some of the most significant voices that have made themselves heard in defining Italy's relationship with Islam and with the Islamic world, in a period of remarkable geopolitical and cultural upheaval from 9/11 to the Arab Spring. It looks in detail at the nature of the arguments that writers, journalists and intellectuals have adduced regarding Islam and at the connections and disjunctions between opposing positions. It examines how events such as military intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq or the protests in Tahrir Square have been represented within Italy and it analyses the rhetorical framework within which the issue of the emergence of Islam as an internal actor within Italian civil society has been articulated.

This book is a journey into the thought and poetry of Giacomo Leopardi. It sheds new light on his compound of poetic imagination and philosophical complexity using different disciplines and approaches (film studies, psychoanalysis, queer theory), showing the relevance of his thought today in the post-human era.

Cinema has played a key role in articulating the impact and legacies of the so-called anni di piombo in Italy, the years of intra-national political terrorism that lasted from 1969 until well into the 1980s. This book offers an analytical exploration of Italian cinema's representation and refraction of those years.

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. This book examines the aggressive campaign that was conducted against the Italian Publishers Federation.

Giorgio Manganelli (1922-1990), one of Italy's most radical and original writers, went further than most in exploring the creative possibilities of hybrid genres and open forms. This study examines the wealth of Manganelli's imagination - his grotesque animals, speaking corpses, and melancholy specters.

This book explores the different ways in which psychoanalysis has been connected to various fields of Italian culture, such as literary criticism, philosophy and art history, as well as discussing scholars who have used psychoanalytical methods in their work. The areas discussed include: the city of Trieste, in chapters devoted to the author Italo Svevo and the artist Arturo Nathan; psychoanalytic interpretations of women terrorists during the anni di piombo; the relationships between the Freudian concept of the subconscious and language in philosophical research in Italy; and a personal reflection by a practising analyst who passes from literary texts to her own clinical experience. The volume closes with a chapter by Giorgio Pressburger, a writer who uses Freud as his Virgil in a narrative of his descent into a modern hell. The volume contains contributions in both English and Italian.

Federico De Robertös work fascinated later Sicilian writers, from Luigi Pirandello to Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Leonardo Sciascia and Vincenzo Consolo, but among critics the picture is different. Only now is his work enjoying a critical revival, after being underestimated for more than a century. This collection of essays offers new critical approaches to his work, traces its reception, analyses his enduring reputation among creative writers and proposes readings of his major novels. The volume concludes with an analysis of Roberto Faenzäs recent (2007) screenplay of De Robertös novel The Viceroys, and an interview with Faenza along with press reviews of his film. Il fascino esercitato da Federico De Roberto su scrittori siciliani quali Luigi Pirandello, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Leonardo Sciascia, Vincenzo Consolo è incontestabile. Ciononostante, la ricezione critica della sua opera è stata ingiustamente tiepida. Solo oggi la sua opera registra un revival critico, dopo essere stata sottovalutata per più di un secolo. I contributi qui raccolti perlustrano nuovi approcci interpretativi, con attenzione anche alla storia della ricezione tra altri autori, e propongono letture inedite dei romanzi principali. Il volume si chiude con un¿analisi della sceneggiatura del recente I Vicerè (2007) di Roberto Faenza, un¿intervista al regista e una ricognizione del dibattito italiano sul film.

Conflicts of Memory

Dispelling widespread views that female same-sex desire is virtually absent from Italian literature and cultural production in the modern era, this groundbreaking study demonstrates that narratives of lesbianism are significantly more numerous than has been previously asserted. Focusing on texts published between 1860 and 1939, the author traces and analyses the evolution of discourses on female same-sex desire in and across a wide variety of genres, whether popular bestsellers, texts with limited distribution and subject to censorship, or translations from other languages. All the works are considered in relation to broader socio-cultural contexts. The analysis uncovers a plurality of different sources for these narratives of lesbianism and desire between women, showing how different layers of discourse emerge from or are reworked in and across several genres. From scientists who condemned the immoral and degenerate nature of Sapphic desire, to erotic publications that revelled in the pleasures of female same-sex intimacy, to portrayals of homoerotic desire by female writers that call (more or less obliquely) for its legitimization, these texts open up important new perspectives on discourses of sexuality in modern Italy.

Questo e il primo libro che esplora sistematicamente le strategie discorsive e le metodologie antropologiche adottate da Pier Paolo Pasolini nei suoi film. L'analisi delle intersezioni tra discorso antropologico, documentario e finzione rivela i modi attraverso cui il cinema di Pasolini sia profondamente correlato all'antropologia visuale, nei modi concettualizzati negli anni Ottanta dalla New Ethnography, sia in termini di pratica che di ricerca teorica. Una delle tesi del libro e che i film di Pasolini contengano ricorsi antropologici che emergono da una discorsivita percettiva che li avvicina a uno dei piu interessanti indirizzi dell'antropologia visuale anglosassone, quello dell'antropologia dei sensi, rendendo manifesto il loro valore pionieristico e visionario. L'analisi delle categorie corporali, topografiche, ritualistiche e identitarie presenti nei film di Pasolini svela inoltre istanze discorsive che si spingono oltre le ideologie coloniali e moderne spesso attribuitegli dalla critica tradizionale.

Despite recent societal anti-political sentiments, Italian cinema has continued to address politics, including reflections on public life, memory, and national identity. This is done via (1) thematic approaches discussing contemporary political film, (2) analyses of prominent directors currently engaged in filone, and (3) case studies of selected films.

In the period 1940 to 1965 the female prostitute featured in at least ten per cent of all Italian-made films, but she cast her shadow over many more. With reference to the changing social and film industrial context, this book explains why the figure of the female prostitute was so prevalent in Italian cinema of this period and offers a new account of her on-screen presence. It shows that the prostitutes that populate Italian cinema are much more than simply 'tarts with hearts' or martyr figures. Via the constant reworking of the prostitute trope across genres, the figure takes us to the heart of many ideological contradictions in postwar Italian cinema and society: these include the entanglement of rhetoric about political truth with the suppression of postwar guilt and shame, fears about racial contamination, and a preoccupation with non-normative forms of masculine behaviour and desire. The book also shows how the female prostitute is important to Italian national cinema as a 'borderline identity', used to establish, but also destabilize, the hegemony of respectable femininities. It is precisely through her borderline condition, this book argues, that the prostitute 'haunts' gender, sometimes policing it, but more often than not problematizing its very construction.

This volume explores the work of authors such as Mario Calabresi, Benedetta Tobagi, Luca Tarantelli and Massimo Coco, whose fathers were victims of Italian political terrorism in the 1970s. It examines how they have narrated their unique experience and how their 'postmemorials' contribute to a new relationship between history and personal memory.

The southern Italian city of Matera was dubbed a "national disgrace" in the immediate post-war period due to media and political focus on its distinctive cave homes, the Sassi. This book explores how and why Matera came to be viewed in such negative terms and investigates the impact this had on the city's social and urban development.

The on-going debate on the legacies of European Orientalism has yet to fully consider its Italian context. This book is a literary and intellectual history both of the reception of European Orientalism in Risorgimento Italy, and of the birth and development of an Italian Orientalist expression in the post-unification and fascist periods.

Questo libro affronta per la prima volta in maniera complessiva l¿attività teatrale di Italo Calvino, dagli anni della produzione giovanile fino alla tormentata riscrittura di Un re in ascolto che accompagnerà l¿autore fino alla morte nel 1985. La ricostruzione filologico-indiziaria dello stile e dei temi utilizzati nelle opere teatrali giovanili perdute e l¿analisi puntuale di un corpus di recensioni teatrali calviniane mai pubblicate in volume fino ad ora costituiscono il fulcro di questo saggio che, oltre a gettare nuova luce su uno dei tanti ¿tavoli di lavorö dello scrittore sanremese, mira a reimpostare il discorso critico sulla militanza politica di Calvino e sulle teorie estetiche da lui promosse nel corso degli anni Cinquanta. Una delle ipotesi avanzate del questo libro è che Calvino oscilli tra ricerca e rimozione della sua identità repressa di drammaturgo e che il rapporto conflittuale con la materia teatrale svolga un ruolo fondamentale nell¿impegno calviniano ad auto-rappresentarsi e a fabbricarsi una identità autoriale in continuo rinnovamento.

L¿Italia degli anni Sessanta non è solo il paese del miracolo economico, delle migrazioni interne e dei conflitti sociali: è anche un paese che scopre (o riscopre) il proprio volto perturbante e lunare, attraverso un vero e proprio boom dell¿occulto che investe ogni settore dell¿industria culturale. A partire dal 1959 ¿ quando il Dracula della Hammer Film Productions intercetta i desideri e le ansie di un¿Italia in rapida trasformazione, suscitando la perplessità di intellettuali e benpensanti ¿ l¿¿insolitö invade la letteratura, il cinema, la cultura popolare: e riceve infine la sua consacrazione nel 1971, quando, a ridosso degli anni di piombo, quindici milioni di telespettatori si appassionano alla serie televisiva Il Segno del comando, ambientata in una Roma notturna e popolata da spettri e sette esoteriche. Tra vampiri cinematografici e fantasmi da salotto, veggenti di campagna e mutanti adolescenti, ferrovieri medium e scommesse col diavolo, Italia lunare riporta alla luce il volto marginale e segreto dell¿Italia del benessere, fornendo una chiave di lettura inedita per comprendere il paese e le sue contraddizioni.

Exploring the contribution of Italy to our understanding of both the history of homosexuality and European modernism, this ground-breaking study analyses three queer modernists - writer Giovanni Comisso, painter and writer Filippo de Pisis, and painter Corrado Cagli.

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.

This book reframes the debate around migration in the Mediterranean, and specifically around Lampedusa, by exploring how art forms - including works by Aida Silvestri, Bouchra Khalili, Isaac Julien, Maya Ramsay, Dagmawi Yimer and Broomberg & Chanarin - have become a platform for subverting the dominant narrative of migration.

Sebastiano Vassalli (1941-2015) engaged in an ambitious project to narrate Italy, the nation, its people and its pathologies. For Vassalli, chimeras are the myths that have repeatedly ensnared the nation, resulting in the social and political dysfunctions he denounces. This book represents the first study of Vassalli's works as a whole.

The law that abolished mental asylums in Italy in 1978 was nicknamed the 'Basaglia Law', after the physician whose work had revolutionised psychiatry in Italy and worldwide: Franco Basaglia (1924-1980). This book shows that his work is still powerful and relevant to contemporary debates about biopolitics.

Modernitalia provides a map of the Italian twentieth century in the form of twelve essays by the celebrated cultural historian Jeffrey T. Schnapp. Shuttling back and forth between literature, architecture, design, and the visual arts, the volume explores the metaphysics of speed, futurist and dada typography, real and imaginary forms of architecture, shifting regimes of mass spectacle, the iconography of labour, exhibitions as modes of public mobilization and persuasion, and the emergence of industrial models of literary culture and communication. The figures featured in the book include Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Mario Morasso, Julius Evola, Piero Portaluppi, Giuseppe Terragni, Alessandro Blasetti, Massimo Bontempelli, Giorgio de Chirico, Bruno Munari, Curzio Malaparte, and Henry Furst. Alongside these human protagonists appear granite blocks that drive the design of modern monuments, military searchlights that animate civilian shows, worker armies viewed as machines, sunglasses that tiptoe along the boundary of the private and public, newsreels as twentieth-century interpretations of Trajan's column, and book covers and bindings that act as authorial self-portraits. The volume captures the Italian path to cultural modernity in all of its brilliance and multiplicity.

Bruno Munari was one of the most important and eclectic twentieth-century European artists, pioneering what would later be labelled kinetic art. Through original archival research and illuminating comparisons with other artists and movements, both within and outside Italy, this volume offers a unique analysis of Munari's seven-decade-long career.

This book addresses a rich corpus of contemporary narratives by authors who have come to Italy as migrants. It traces the figurative commonalities that emerge across these diverse texts, which together suggest the shape and substance of what might be termed 'migrant imaginaries'. Examining five central figures and concepts - identity, memory, home, place and space, and literature - across a range of novels and stories by writers of African and Middle Eastern origin, the study elucidates the affective and expressive processes that inflect migrant story-telling. Drawing on the work of cultural theorists such as Sara Ahmed and Michel de Certeau, as well as on recent work in postcolonial literary studies, memory studies, human geography and feminist theory, the book probes the varied works of Shirin Ramzanali Fazel, Amara Lakhous, Mohsen Melliti, Younis Tawfik and many others. Each chapter posits alternative interpretations of the ways in which the interior experience of encounters across territories, cultures and languages is figured in this literature. In doing so, the book moves towards a wider apprehension of recent Italian migration narratives as suggestions of what a new notion of contemporary 'Italian' literature might look like, figured at once within and beyond the boundaries of a national literature, a national language and a national cultural imaginary.

Scholars of Italian colonialism have been reluctant to acknowledge the influence that local populations and their culture had on Italians and on the ways in which they settled and administered the territories they occupied. In this title, the essays addresses the gap in Italian colonial/post-colonial studies.

The Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri was one of the most significant visual artists of the late twentieth century. This volume introduces his photographic and critical work to a broader audience and positions Ghirri more firmly within global artistic debates, breaking new ground by approaching Ghirri's oeuvre from interdisciplinary perspectives.

Entering the Frame

Il contesto italiano contemporaneo e di fatto un esempio quanto mai interessante e sintomatico per il definirsi di forme plurali e non monologiche di impegno politico-culturale, che pur rifiutando forme di assolutismo o essenzialismo epistemico o ideologico, mantengono fede a una consolidata tradizione di engagement artistico.