Cultural Sociology of Cultural Representations

Christopher Thorpe is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Exeter. He is a historically oriented sociologist of culture and cultural sociologist. He has written in the areas of classical and modern social theory, cultural representations, food, and cultural translation. His specialist research interests focus on Anglo-Italian cultural representations relations, and interchange.

‘This book is a signal achievement of cultural sociology, reconstructing and interpreting the collective representation of "nations" and "civilizations" at a macro level and over shifting historical time. Thorpe shows, not only how British thinkers understood "Italy" in terms of the binary code of good and evil, but how that signification inverted in the wake of the English Reformation. An original and compelling work.’ - Jeffrey C. Alexander, Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology, Yale University, USA.‘Just as Marx turned Hegel on his head, so too does Christopher Thorpe comprehensively upend 40 years' worth of conventional thinking in the post-Saidian interdisciplinary study of cultural representations. He thereby provides a radically new interpretation of how the British have understood Italy and the Italians over hundreds of years. The book should appeal to sociologists who want their predictable paradigms shaken, and to historians, of Anglo-Italian relations and much else, who want their field cleared of idealising bourgeois obfuscation.’ – David Inglis, Professor of Sociology, University of Helsinki, Finland

• Introduction: Cultural Sociology of Cultural Representations of Italy 1. Methods, Theory, Data 2. Italy as Paradise and Hell 3. Republican Rome and Imperial Britain 4. Italy as Re-enchantment and Refuge 5. Italy as Salvation and Liberation 6. Multiple Italys Past; Multiple Italys Present 7. Italy as Illusion and Paradox Conclusion