Moving Texts / Testi mobili – serie

The volume is a collection of essays focussing on the cultural construction, perception and representation of public and private spaces in 20th and 21st century Italian culture. Through the study of a variety of spaces, this book provides an exploration of the notions of private self and public sphere and considers their interaction. It focuses on areas where the spheres of public and private merge, meet or clash, and assesses the role played by spatial practices and representations in the complex coexistence, mutual definition and constant negotiation of public and private. It offers a variety of approaches, ranging from literature to history, art history, film and cultural studies. It brings to the fore issues relating to the production of space, such as perceptions and definitions of the self and privacy, the politics of the private and public, gender representations, the construction of collective and cultural memory, and the relationship between the individual and the urban environmnent.

The works of Giorgio Scerbanenco repeatedly articulate and explore the implications of new forms of criminality that emerged in Italy’s post-war transformation towards its «economic miracle». An indepth analysis of Scerbanenco’s Duca Lamberti series constitutes the critical focus of this study, and in particular the psychological resonances of the role played by the author’s controversial representation of the urban space, its violence, (in)justice and gender roles. In what way do these elements heighten and/or exaggerate the nature of the criminal acts and the reader’s experience? This study therefore investigates a reader’s potential response to the content, the settings, and, above all, the characters Scerbanenco portrays in these four novels.

The book explores the intimate connection between poetry and politics in modernity and, in particular, in liberal and fascist Italy. Through a historical and interdisciplinary approach, the essays focus on various fundamental passages of liberal system crisis: political poetry as an act of rebellion against the social and economic system; as a tool of disintegration of bourgeois morality and civilization; as a pillar of the building and consolidation of the fascist regime; as a central instrument of the myth of the 'new man'. What emerges is a mosaic capable of enlightening the values and disvalues and the transformation of Italian radical and nationalist mindset, through the elimination of the boundaries between ‘matter’ and ‘spirit’ and between different disciplines: as in the liberal period, political poetry deals with new issues such as Time, Space, and the Body, so in the totalitarian Fascist culture integrates and contaminates other aesthetic forms: theatre, dance, architecture