Italian Modernities – serie

The on-going debate on the legacies of modern European Orientalism has yet to fully consider its Italian context. Italian Orientalism is an interdisciplinary and transnational study both of the reception of European Orientalism in Risorgimento Italy, and of the development of an Italian Orientalist expression in the post-unification and fascist periods. The pan-European phenomenon is approached in its epistemological, aesthetic and political dimensions, while focusing on India and Indology as triggers of the so-called «Oriental Renaissance» and the Indo-European or Aryan idea. Fabrizio De Donno analyses the relationship between Orientalist scholarship and literary aesthetics in their related European and Italian contexts, mapping their interaction with linguistic, racial, religious and colonial thought. Paying particular attention to some of the major Italian intellectual, academic and literary figures of the time – from Giovanni Berchet, Giacomo Leopardi and Carlo Cattaneo, to Angelo De Gubernatis, Cesare Lombroso, Carlo Conti Rossini, Giosuè Carducci, Guido Gozzano and others – the book explores how Orientalism and Aryanism emerge as major if controversial discourses of modernity. They provide the rhetorical tools of identity politics which, it is argued, are central to notions of Italian nationhood, cosmopolitanism and Euromania.

QUEER(ING) GENDER IN ITALIAN WOMEN’S WRITING is the first study of its kind to systematically use queer theory as a theoretical framework of analysis of Italian women’s writing. Focusing especially on the writers Dacia Maraini, Goliarda Sapienza and Elsa Morante, and delimiting the field of enquiry to works written in the 1970s and 1980s, the book positions its chosen texts in their historical and cultural backdrop and illustrates the ways in which the authors responded in highly original ways to the debates of the day in matters of gender and sexuality, bringing them close to current «queer» formulations. Judith Butler is a key interlocutor here, as in the few existing critical contributions offering a «queer» reading of texts from the Italian literary tradition, but rather than rely predominantly on her theorisation of the performative quality of gender, this book incorporates additional concepts that are key to Butler’s notion of queer, such as «parody», «citationality», «drag» and «undoing gender». It further seeks to enrich existing critical debates on Italian women’s writing, and on Maraini, Sapienza and Morante in particular, by considering them in relation to other influential queer theorists – including Teresa de Lauretis, Jack Halberstam, Lee Edelman, Sara Ahmed and (the author’s queer reading of) Julia Kristeva – in the belief that the plurality intrinsic to the formulation of «queer» is crucial for its potential as a tool for critical inquiry.This book was the Joint Winner of the 2017 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Modern Italian Studies.

Italian political terrorism of the 1970s has produced in its aftermath a rich body of memorial writing, created not only by victims or perpetrators but also by the secondary victims of violence, often children of the dead, who many years after their loss ask why their parents or relatives were chosen as targets, what it means for them personally and for the history of the Italian anni di piombo. This volume brings together a body of essays that explore this field of «postmemorial» writing, a field that extends the scope of memory studies, particularly in relation to political violence, and especially when those memories are fragile and indirect. The book analyses the work of victims’ children such as Mario Calabresi, Benedetta Tobagi, Luca Tarantelli and Massimo Coco, exploring how these authors and others have narrated their unique experiences, from their distant memories of their fathers – each assassinated by different Italian terrorist groups – to their more recent struggles to deal with state institutions ill-equipped to respond to, or indifferent to, their plight. It further examines how their «postmemorial» works have contributed to a new relationship between history and personal memory in Italy. All of these writers, impelled by a sense of marginalization, frustration and sometimes anger to become actors and witnesses against their own will, have added their own indispensable tiles to the mosaic of a national and collective memory of the 1970s that is still largely unresolved in Italy today.

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, which housed an estimated 15,000 people in the early 1950s. The Italian government implemented a rehousing programme for Matera’s cave dwellers in 1952. As a result, the Sassi were gradually emptied and the local population was rehoused in purpose-built rural villages and urban quarters. However, the rehousing programme was beset by numerous problems and was never fully completed.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. Drawing on previously neglected primary sources, it charts the discursive construction of Matera as a «national disgrace» in the context of post-war Italy’s complex political landscape, renewed interest in the southern question, and narratives of the Italian nation. These themes are examined through the lens of recent scholarship in the history of emotions, the history of nationalism, urban history, and the new southern history.

«Questo volume […] non si limita a descrivere, ma ricompone un quadro finora assente. I 37 capitoli che compongono questo volume-monstre dettagliano aspetti, figure, momenti spesso messi da parte nel dibattito.　…　Attraverso i diversi capitoli il lettore percepisce la pervasività [dell’industria] che si fa ideologema, le sue diverse realizzazioni e simbolizzazioni artistiche (cinematografiche e letterarie), e si rende conto che non si tratta solo di una «moda» o un momentaneo interesse dovuto a qualche intellettuale innamorato degli operai.»(Carlo Tirinanzi De Medici, University of Pisa, in SigMa 6 (2022)) «Il libro rappresenta senza dubbio un’indagine preziosa sulla rappresentazione del lavoro e dell’industria nell’Italia del dopoguerra. Molte sono le piste che esso ha il merito di aprire, così come le domande e le questioni che mette in gioco.»(Federico Pierotti, University of Picardie Jules Verne, in SigMa 6 (2022))«L'autorevolezza del volume risiede principalmente in tre ragioni: la cornice teorica chiara ma al tempo stesso originale; il contributo e l’apporto dei maggiori esperti sul tema; la capacità di riflettere sulla letteratura industriale non solo a partire dalla cornice cronologica «classica» di questi saggi (che vanno grosso modo dall’inizio del boom economico alla fine degli anni Settanta), ma inserendola in un discorso che porta ai giorni nostri rendendo così tale letteratura una specificità nel contesto letterario italiano.　…　Un coraggioso tentativo di creare un canone letterario e cinematografico delle produzioni culturali industriali italiane.»(Daniele Comberieti, Paul Valéry University Montpellier 3, in Annali d’Italianistica 40 (2022))«…uno dei volumi più autorevoli sulla letteratura industriale.»(Daniele Comberieti, Paul Valéry University Montpellier 3, in Annali d’Italianistica 40 (2022))This book explores the representation of industrial labor in Italian literature and film from the 1950s through the 1970s. The first article of the postwar Italian Constitution states that the Republic is founded on labor. Forces across the political spectrum, from Catholic to communist, invested labor with the power to build a new national community after Fascism and war. The 1950s-1970s saw dramatic transformations, in economic, social and cultural terms, as labor moved from agriculture to industry and a whole generation of Italian writers and filmmakers used literature and cinema to interpret – and influence – these changes and to capture the new experiences of industrial labor. The essays in this book offer a comprehensive panorama of this generation’s work, examining key questions and texts, set against the context of history and theory, gender and class, geography and the environment, as well as their precursors and present-day successors.

Bruno Munari was one of the most important and eclectic twentieth-century European artists. Dubbed the «Leonardo and Peter Pan» of contemporary art, he pioneered what would later be labelled kinetic art, playing a key role in the constitution and definition of the aesthetic programmes of groups such as Movimento Arte Concreta and Programmed Art. He became an internationally recognized name in the field of industrial design, winning the prestigious «Compasso d’Oro» prize four times, while also being a prominent figure in Italian graphic design, working for magazines such as Tempo and Domus, as well as renowned publishing companies such as Einaudi and Bompiani. He left an indelible mark as an art pedagogue and popularizer with his famous 1970s artistic laboratories for children and was the author of numerous books, ranging from essays on art and design to experimental books.Capturing a resurgent interest in Munari at the international level, the exceptional array of critical voices in this volume constitutes an academic study of Munari of a depth and range that is unprecedented in any language, offering a unique analysis of Munari’s seven-decade-long career. Through original archival research, and illuminating and generative comparisons with other artists and movements both within and outside Italy, the essays gathered here offer novel readings of more familiar aspects of Munari’s career while also addressing those aspects that have received scant or no attention to date.

Given fascist proscriptions against homosexuality, a surprising number of artists under Mussolini’s regime were queer. 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. None self-identified as fascists; none, however, were consistent critics of the regime. All understood their own sexuality via the idea of the primitive – a discourse fascism also employed in its efforts to secure consent for the dictatorship. What happens when we return to these men and their work minus the assumption that our most urgent task is identifying their fascist tendencies or political quietism? Variously infantilized, pathologized, marginalized, and stigmatized, treated as both cause and effect of fascism, queer ventennio artists are an easy target, not brave or selfless or savvy enough to see their common struggle with fascism’s other victims. Revisiting their works and lives with an eye toward neither rehabilitation nor condemnation allows us to ponder more carefully the relationship between art and politics, how homophobia has structured art criticism, the need to further bring queer perspectives to Italian cultural analysis, and how such men disrupt our sense of modern homo/heterosexual definition.

«As Italy tends to be studied increasingly in transnational and transcultural perspective, there is an ever-greater need for studies that explore the country's relationship with other geographical areas and cultural configurations. Linetto Basilone's work is an important contribution to research of this kind. The work provides a panoramic view of how journalists and travel writers from the late nineteenth century to the 1980s have sought to represent China, its relationship with Italy, and its growing geopolitical significance. The ideological and cultural context in which Italian observers were writing is always appropriately foregrounded; the analysis of the work of individual writers is nuanced and sophisticated; and the exploration of the inter-relation of different positionalities is intriguing throughout. The text will be of interest to anyone interested in understanding the cultural history of Italy's relationship with China.»(Charles Burdett, Director, Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies, University of London)　Over the course of the twentieth century, China became a destination of choice for hundreds of the most prominent Italian writers, journalists, and politicians. Informed by the cultural, economic, and political relationship between Italy and China since the late 1890s, the travel narratives of these authors contributed to the creation of multiple and varied representations of the country. This book fills a gap in the study of the development of Italian travel narratives on twentieth-century China. It classifies the major portraits of China under five chronologically and ideologically ordered types of representation and offers readers a structured understanding of the processes of «writing» China in Italy. The study sheds new light on how China was associated with the specific cultural, political, and social traits of Italy and Italian culture; how it reinforced ideological indoctrination among Italian intellectual elites; and how significant such travel narratives were for the ideological orientation of the Italian readership. The authors discussed in the book include, among others: Luigi Barzini Sr., Mario Appelius, Arnaldo Cipolla, Franco Fortini, Carlo Cassola, Curzio Malaparte, Alberto Moravia, Goffredo Parise, Maria Antonietta Macciocchi, Gianni Rodari, Luigi Malerba, Alberto Arbasino, Edoarda Masi, and Tiziano Terzani.

Sebastiano Vassalli (1941–2015) engaged in an ambitious project to narrate Italy, the nation, its people and its pathologies. His vast cast of characters includes a prototypical fascist father, a terrorist son, a Carmelite nun, Virgil and other literary giants, Francesco Crispi, and an orphan girl burnt as a witch. His historical panorama delves into memory, regional geographies, and national identity to interrogate the condition of the Italian nation since World War II. For Vassalli, chimeras are the myths or illusions that have repeatedly ensnared the nation, resulting in the national, social, and geopolitical dysfunctions that he denounces. Despite his literary successes and prizes (the Campiello Prize for his career, shortlisting for the Nobel Prize for Literature), he remains isolated on the Italian literary scene. This absence of critical attention largely stems from his combative relationship with the literary establishment, which developed after he broke with the neoavantgarde of the 1960s and was reinforced by his accusatory stance toward contemporary society. This book represents the first study of Vassalli’s works as a whole, investigating this difficult, contradictory, yet highly accomplished intellectual who was a major commentator on postwar society and a strongly original voice in Italian literature.

Runner-up in the 2023 N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature from the Electronic Literature Organization«At last, here is a book written by an Italian about the homeopathic but essential role that Italian artists, and among them, important writers, have played to introduce the digital transformation to Italians. Long before government or business, and least of all educators, took notice, artists, as was their wont for centuries, were the first to reveal the potential of the new technologies. Emanuela Patti not only pays them a long overdue tribute, but along the way revisits with care and engaging style the key features of that transformation. A wonderful read!» (Professor Derrick de Kerckhove, University of Toronto)«We were missing a systematic survey of e-literary arts in Italy. Emanuela Patti has filled that void. Indeed, her study is much more than a survey: it brilliantly connects semiotic theories of open textuality to the profound techno-cultural transformations of socio-political life from the 1960s to the present, from experimental writing to popular culture.» (Professor Massimo Riva, Brown University)In 1962, Umberto Eco published Opera aperta, setting the ground for a new wave of creative experimentation across the arts and media. The concept of «open work» – informed by systems theory, cybernetics, relativism, pragmatism and other influential disciplines of the time – was used by Eco to reconsider the work of art as a site for interactivity, collaboration and intermediality. Starting from this perspective, this book reconstructs the history of Italian electronic literature, looking at creative practices across literature, electronic and digital media from the early days of computers to the social media age. It examines how Italian writers, poets, literary critics and intellectuals have responded to each phase of the digital revolution, by enacting «poetics of openness» and «politics of intermediality». Case studies include Nanni Balestrini, Gianni Toti, Italo Calvino, Caterina Davinio, Wu Ming, Michela Murgia, Francesco Pecoraro, Roberto Saviano, Tommaso Pincio, Fabio Viola, Fabrizio Venerandi and Enrico Colombini. In some cases, literary experimentation with new technologies has taken a clear polemical stance towards mass media, globalisation, information society and late capitalism, in order to challenge and/or reconfigure artistic or social ontologies. In others, digital technologies have been used to enhance and extend the parameters and «languages» of literature.

This book offers a queer reading of the oeuvre of Sicilian director Emma Dante, winner of the 2026 Theatre Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale. It contextualises Dante’s work within the longstanding anti-meridionalist North–South binary that has dogged Italy history and culture, and argues that Dante exemplifies a Southern and queer epistemology that unsettles this divide and revalorises the South. The book examines this alternative understanding of the South in Dante’s work, focusing in turn on the poetics of human and nonhuman kinship, oddkin, and queer families; haunting and temporality; and Southern cultural bodies (the Opera dei Pupi and the femminelle). Throughout, it situates Dante’s production within a broader genealogy of cultural texts and practices that are also both queer and Southern, drawing connections with works by artists such as Letizia Battaglia, Liliana Cavani, Jolanda Insana, Curzio Malaparte, Fabio Mollo, Elsa Morante, and Ferzan Özpetek. Working on and with Emma Dante – on her oeuvre and the expansive cultural network it generates – the book ultimately argues that queerness, far from being the marginal ‘other’ of the Italian South, is situated at the core of its cultural, theoretical, and epistemological articulation.

«From the violence of growth and the mountains of garbage to migrant lives brutally cast away in the Mediterranean, what constitutes waste? Who defines and arranges its semantics? This collection of thoughtful essays takes us into the unsuspected depths of the question—the discarded returns to interrogate our lives while we continue our savage trashing of the planet. »(Iain Chambers, Independent Scholar and Writer, former Professor of Cultural, Postcolonial and Mediterranean Studies at the University of Naples, L’Orientale)«From the flea market to the nuclear waste dump, this insightful collection dives into Mediterranean stories of dirt, rot, decay, trash, junk, and toxic waste, finding critical lessons about politics, ethics, and contemporary values in the materialities of reviled, discarded and forgotten items. Across landscapes, genres, languages, and histories, the authors track heartbreaking instances of cultural and environmental erasure as well as powerful stories of political and material resistance. In a contemporary era of mass extinctions and ubiquitous PFOAs and microplastics, this choral meditation on the fateful dynamics of marginal but resistant matter speaks volumes. »(Elena Past, Professor of Italian, Wayne State University)Whether hidden or exposed, waste demands to be explored and understood vis-à-vis the wider social, economic, political, cultural, and material systems that shape everyday life.　This volume engages with the ambivalence embedded in and materialized by waste, its ambiguous ownership and temporalities. It interrogates popular and normative notions of waste and discard and offers insight into forms of ecology built around waste – in particular, with reference to the Italian and, more broadly, the Mediterranean area.The contributions to the volume analyze questions of submerged/emerging «wasted lives», waste management and mismanagement in urban and suburban areas, and landscape conservation and erasure. Chapters also consider literary depictions of trash and filth as markers of class or otherness and filmic narratives of the wasteocene. The aim is to explore the locality of Italy and the Mediterranean within the wider, planetary system of relations that hinges on production and discard, accumulation, and waste.

"Mysterious Flames" engages with Umberto Eco’s work from a new perspective, by tracing his intellectual development through the lens of Cultural Studies, drawing in particular on the thought of Antonio Gramsci and Stuart Hall. It offers the first detailed analysis of Eco’s representation of Italian fascism across his fiction and non-fiction, focusing especially on his 2004 novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, a semi-autobiographical work that explores fascism through its mass cultural artifacts. Through a detailed analysis of Eco’s novel and a range of his other writings, the book examines how the regime used the media to construct national identity and connects this process to Eco’s semiotic approach to subjectivity and individual identity – concepts that he addressed only fragmentarily across his works, without ever articulating a comprehensive theory. The book aims to stitch these fragments together and thereby to present a cohesive interpretation of fascism and mass culture contained within his work that sheds important new light on Eco’s thought.

This book challenges widespread and largely negative assumptions about Italian postmodernism and postmodernism in general. It considers contemporary Italian culture as a particularly interesting testing-ground for pluriform struggles of an ethical or political kind, struggles which build upon, whilst rejecting the essentialist assumptions behind, conventional notions of artistic commitment, or impegno.Drawing on a variety of cultural fields and artistic media – from cinema to the literary genres of autobiography, romance and the giallo; from feminism to pensiero debole; from theatrical performance to shared practices of cultural memory – the volume charts instances of ethical commitment and emancipatory social and political intervention in Italian culture within a post-ideological and post-hegemonic framework, siding with a more constructive and less ‘apocalyptic’ analysis of the cultural climate of the past two decades in Italy. This balancing act is described by the contributors as ‘postmodern impegno’. The authors, artists and thinkers discussed in the essays include, among others, Eraldo Affinati, Adriana Cavarero, Marco Tullio Giordana, Carlo Lucarelli, Nanni Moretti, Marco Paolini, Roberto Saviano, Gianni Vattimo and Antonio Tabucchi.Questo libro mette in discussione la diffusa posizione critica che tende a svalutare l’esperienza culturale della postmodernità e del postmodernismo in Italia. Il contesto italiano contemporaneo è 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.Partendo dall’analisi di vari generi e strategie discorsive – cinema, teatro, filosofia, letteratura di genere (romance, giallo, autobiografia) o di denuncia – e di vari autori – Eraldo Affinati, Adriana Cavarero, Marco Tullio Giordana, Carlo Lucarelli, Nanni Moretti, Marco Paolini, Roberto Saviano, Antonio Tabucchi, Gianni Vattimo, e altri – questo volume raccoglie e analizza esempi di impegno etico e di intervento socio-politico all’interno di una prospettiva post-ideologica e post-egemonica, proponendo una visione più costruttiva e meno «apocalittica» del clima culturale generale degli ultimi vent’anni in Italia.

The figure of the child has long been a mainstay of Italian cinema, conventionally interpreted as a witness of adult shortcomings, a vessel of innocence, hope and renewal, or an avatar of nostalgia for the (cinematic) past. New Visions of the Child in Italian Cinema challenges these settled categories of interpretation and reconsiders the Italian canon as it relates to the child. The book draws on a growing body of new work in the history and theory of children on film and is the first volume to bring together and to apply some of these new approaches to Italian cinema. Chapters in the book address aspects of industry and spectatorship and the varied film psychology of infancy, childhood and adolescence, as well as genres as diverse as silent cinema, contemporary teen movies, melodrama and film ethnography. The contributors engage with a wide range of modes and theories including neorealism, auteurism and contemporary postfeminism. The book maps out new roles for gender, the transnational, loss and mourning, and filmmaking itself, leading to a revised understanding of the child in Italian cinema.

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.

Law 180, which abolished mental asylums in Italy, was passed in 1978. It came to be known as the ‘Basaglia Law’, after the physician whose work revolutionised psychiatry in Italy and worldwide. Franco Basaglia (1924-1980) battled to overturn an obsolete but prevalent conception of psychiatry, rooted in the asylum, where allegedly dangerous madmen were incarcerated rather than cured. Following Law 180, the asylum system was indeed dismantled in Italy, to be replaced by community centres. This radical transformation coincided with the emergence of ‘biopolitics’, a direct involvement of political power with the biological lives of the subjects, by means of homogenising disciplines such as the statistical analysis of the population. Examining both his practice and his theory of psychiatry, this book argues that Franco Basaglia foresaw this change in the paradigm of power, and that it is possible to trace its embryonic conception in his writings. Combining history of ideas, social and cultural history, and philosophical analysis, the book contextualises Basaglia’s works within the intense current debate on biopolitics. In doing so, it shows not only how his theory of the subject and his criticism of psychiatry are still as powerful and relevant now as they were in the 1970s, but also how Basaglia’s philosophy makes an integral contribution to the burgeoning field of contemporary Italian theory.

Italy is one of the most recent immigratory destinations in Europe, having long been one of the continent’s most important sources of emigration. Due to its strategic position in the Mediterranean, the Italian peninsula is a crossroads of complex transnational movements and represents a unique and dynamic context for the study of contemporary migration and its representation through the diverse channels of media, literature and film.The product of a two-year interdisciplinary research project into representations of migration to Italy, this volume brings together scholarly contributions from the fields of migration studies, linguistics, media, literature and film studies as well as essays by practitioners and activists. It provides both a multi-faceted snapshot of how diverse representations of immigration capture experiences and affect decision-making dynamics and an in-depth study of how media, literature and cinema contribute to the public perception of migrants within the destination culture.

Fictions of Appetite explores and investigates the aesthetic significance of images of food, appetite and consumption in a body of modernist literature published in Italian between 1905 and 1939. The corpus examined includes novels, short stories, poems, essays and plays by F.T. Marinetti, Aldo Palazzeschi, Massimo Bontempelli, Paola Masino and Luigi Pirandello. The book underlines the literary relevance and symbolic implications of the «culinary sign», suggesting a link between the crisis of language and subjectivity usually associated with modernism and figures of consumption and corporeal self-obliteration in «alimentary» discourse. In revisiting these works under label of modernism, which has traditionally been shunned in the Italian critical field, the volume brings critical discourse on early twentieth-century Italian literature closely into line with that of other Western literatures. The author argues that an alimentary perspective not only sheds striking new light on each of the texts examined, but also illustrates the signifying power of the culinary sign, its relations to the aesthetic sphere and its prominent role in the construction of a modernist sensibility.

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.

In nineteenth-century Italy, a woman’s place was considered to be in the domestic sphere, devoted to family life. But during the Risorgimento and the years following Unification, economic, political and social changes enabled women progressively to engage in pursuits that had previously been the exclusive domain of men. This book traces some of the steps of this shift in cultural perception. Covering the period from the Unification of Italy in 1861 to the First World War, the volume brings together new perspectives on women, culture and gender in ten original interdisciplinary chapters that explore a variety of subjects, including motherhood and spinsterhood, women’s relationship with the Italian language, emigration and brigantaggio, patriotism and travel writing, acting and theatre management, film-making, and political ideas and female solidarity.

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.