Toronto Italian Studies – serie

Building on extensive archival research and important scholarly analysis, Galeazzo Ciano: The Fascist Pretender examines the life of Galeazzo Ciano, foreign minister of fascist Italy from 1936 to 1943 and Benito Mussolini’s son-in-law. Ciano’s life serves as a lens through which to gain a better understanding of crucial issues of Italian and European fascism, including the fascistization of society and politics, foreign relations, and the problem of succession. The biography follows an innovative thematic structure that focuses on major aspects of Ciano’s life, including his family, his political career, his diplomacy, and his desire to succeed Mussolini.Filling a substantial gap in the existing literature on the history of fascism, this book is the first comprehensive analysis of a key player of Italian fascism other than Mussolini; it also offers a long overdue critical assessment of Ciano’s famous diary, one of the most important texts from the period. Using visual materials such as photographs and films as sources and not just as illustrative material, Tobias Hof allows us to rethink our understanding of fascism and offers a new perspective on the history of fascist Italy.

In this ground-breaking work, Ellen Nerenberg offers an analysis of the confinement experience in Italian narrative between 1930 and 1960, the last fifteen years of Fascism and the fifteen that followed. Nerenberg diverges from the notion that a radical break from Fascism coincided with Mussolini's fall, instead revealing a disturbing continuity of social restraints following World War II. Drawing on critical discourses of architectural design, urban planning, and cultural geography, Nerenberg offers readings of Buzzati, Piovène, de Céspedes, Banti, Morante, Pratolini, and Gadda. Not limiting herself to prisons, she also explores military barracks, convents, brothels, and homes as carceral homologue. In a surprising investigation of the male body as defined by the architectural space of the barracks and the discursive practices of military guides and journals, she challenges the notion circulated during Fascism of a homogenous model of masculinity. She also probes the social and symbolic positions of women in relation to confinement, the law, power, and liberty. In a chapter titled "House Arrest," she treats the ominous space of the home as a homologue for prison wherein "women are induced into criminality." A study of literal and literary spaces during and after Italian Fascism, this work examines the ways in which Fascist cultural and discursive practices and ideology endure in other guises past the fall of the Regime.

Eighteenth-century Italian playwright Pietro Chiari designated the age he lived in 'The Century of Women' - an age when women gained considerable power through education and admission to various academic positions and professions. Structured as an extended disputation, this book tells the tale of five paradigmatic and ideologically divergent eighteenth-century Italian texts by male and female authors whose leitmotif is woman. These include an academic debate, a scientific tract, an oration, an Enlightenment journal, and a fashion magazine. Analysis focuses on the specific ways in which the exigencies of the 'new science' and the burgeoning Enlightenment project founded on rational civil law, secular moral philosophy, and utilitarian social ethics forced a transformation in the formal controversy about women.By uncovering the characteristics of the expansive dominant discourse about women among Italian Enlightenment thinkers and of the counter-discourse women authors produced to assert their own distinct authority over constructions of femininity and the public sphere, this study reconceives eighteenth-century Italian culture and rectifies misconceptions about Italy's position and influence within the literary republic of the European Enlightenment. Groundbreaking and original, this study is the first to examine the contribution of women to the Republic of Letters of the Settecento, and will revise prevailing notions of eighteenth-century Italian culture and academia.

The nineteenth century represents a crucial historical and cultural phase in the development of modern Italy. Writing to Delight provides a selection of short stories written by some of the most accomplished and acclaimed female authors of nineteenth-century Italy, made available to an English-speaking audience for the first time through this translation. The stories that make up this anthology are written in a realistic vein and describe the life and concerns of women at a time when Italy was going through major social and economic changes. Imbued with didactic aims, the authors of these stories strove to inspire and at the same time educate their public. In this regard, Writing to Delight also serves as an instrument for a critical investigation of both the cultural productions of nineteenth-century Italy and the process of formation of modern Italian identities. With the growth of the middle-classes and a more diffuse literacy among the population, women became a visible and conspicuous social force as consumers of cultural goods, such as books and newspapers. Many of the writers included in this anthology - Matilde Serao, Marchesa Colombi, Neera, Contessa Lara - were not only very successful writers of fiction but also worked as journalists for some of the main national newspapers of the time. They were well acquainted with their readers' tastes and expectations and made such awareness an integral part of their creative process. Their fiction thus reflects the many topics and concerns that informed the social and cultural debates of nineteenth-century Italy.

As the Second World War drew to a close, European borders were being redrawn. The regions of Istria, Dalmatia, and Venezia Giulia, nominally Italian but at various times also belonging to Austria and Germany, fell under the rule of Yugoslavia and its dictator Marshal Tito. The ensuing removal and genocide of Italians from these regions had been little explored or even discussed until 1999, when the esteemed Italian journalist Arrigo Petacco wrote L'esodo: La tragedia negata degli italiani d'Istria, Dalmazia e Venezia Giulia. Now this story is available in English as A Tragedy Revealed.Petacco explains the history of the regions and how they were shifted between empires for centuries. The greater part of the story however details the genocidal program of the Yugoslav Communist government toward the native Italians in the regions. Based on previously unavailable archival documents and oral accounts from people who were there, Petacco reveals the events and exposes the Italian government's mishandling – and then official silence on – the situation. This is a riveting work on a little-known, tragic event written by one of Italy's most highly regarded journalists.

Designed to teach the basic elements of the Italian language, this book is a breakthrough in the field of language studies. Its easy, stimulating, and enjoyable approach to learning Italian will benefit beginners and more advanced speakers alike.An opening chapter on Italian spelling and pronunciation is followed by thirty lessons, each one introducing a conversational theme centred around a crossword puzzle. The lessons present new words and expressions, sample conversations, and language notes, each one building on the last and presenting puzzles that are progressively more challenging. A number of chapters designed as reviews include word-search puzzles and anagrams. Answers are at the back, along with verb conjugation charts and language glossaries.An ideal learning tool for anyone who has little time for serious study but can always find a minute to do a crossword puzzle, this book will also provide an excellent course supplement at both high-school and university levels.

In this companion volume to L'Italia verso il Duemila, Ugo Skubikowski provides a glimpse into authentic Italian life through the presentation of twelve interviews with Italians. Intended as a text for students in second-year university and beyond, Vite italiane brings together discussions with Italians from different regions and backgrounds, who speak candidly about a wide range of experiences. Among those we encounter are a recent university graduate, a widow raising a young daughter as a single mother, a high school teacher who has traded her leftist political activism for a new, more moderate approach, and a successful, ambitious restauranteur. These and other interviews provide a fascinating and varied picture of life in Italy as experienced and described by Italians themselves.

Designed for beginning students of Italian at the high-school, university, and community college levels, Lettura e Conversazione is a series of interesting, stimulating dialogues and readings based on actual experiences and situations that the student faces in daily life, It stresses the acquisition of useful, practical vocabulary and the development of speaking and comprehension skills.

Italian words that resemble words in English but have different meanings are the cause of student bafflement and some hilariously mistaken usage. Examples of falsi amici that continue to amuse teachers of Italian include casino, which is a brothel or mess, not a gambling place, and intossicazione, which is food poisoning, not intoxication. Ronnie Ferguson has confronted the much-neglected problem of `false friends,' or deceptive cognates, with a dictionary which makes it possible for the student of Italian to alert her- or himself to the pitfalls. Accurate translation, essay work, and comprehension hinge on the confident handling of key words prone to incorrect interpretation, and Italian False Friends will be a useful tool to assist students to improve their proficiency in these areas.This book is an excellent companion volume to Interferenze Lessicali:Italiano-inglese, the practical teaching workbook with drills and exercises by Marina Sasu Frescura published earlier in the series. Italian False Friends is effectively illustrated with samples from newspapers, magazines, street signs, and books.

This workbook offers the teacher of Italian a varied collection of activities for the classroom. The thirty-one activities involve situations and guided exercises for creating dialogues, exchanging information, providing descriptions, and completing questionnaires and forms. In L’italiano si impara in due students work in pairs. The situations and contexts are typical of Italian society, combining topics of interest to contemporary Italian youth with traditional elements of Italian culture. The book is intended for beginner and intermediate students as a means of integrating and complementing a basic course of study.In each unit, grammatical structures are introduced and developed, as is vocabulary. Interaction between students is ensured by the complementary, two-part composition of the text. An exhaustive glossary that includes all idiomatic expressions and jargon used in the activities completes the book.

The Trilogia della vita (Trilogy of Life) is a series of three films that Pier Paolo Pasolini completed before his horrifying assassination in 1975, and it remains among the most controversial of his cinematic works. In Allegories of Contamination Patrick Rumble provides an incisive critical and theoretical study of these films and the Marxist filmmaker's complex, original concept of the cinematic medium.With the three films that make up the Trilogy of Life – The Decameron, Canterbury Tales, andThe Arabian Nights – Pasolini attempts to recapture the aura surrounding popular, predominantly oral forms of storytelling through a pro-modern vision of innocent, unalienated bodies and pleasures. In these works Pasolini appears to abandon the explicitly political engagement that marked his earlier works - films that led him to be identified with other radical filmmakers such as Bellocchio, Bertolucci, and Godard. However, Pasolini insisted that these were his 'most ideological films,' and his political engagement translates into a mannerist, anti-classical style or what he called a 'cinema of poetry.' Rumble offers a comparative study based on the concept of 'aesthetic contamination,' which is fundamental to the understanding of Pasolini's poetics. Aesthetic contamination concerns the mediation between different cultures and different historical moments. Through stylistic experimentation, the Trilogy of Life presents a genealogy of visual codes, an interrogation of the subjectivity of narrative cinema. In these films Pasolini celebrates life, and perhaps therein lies their simple heresy.

Twentieth-century Italian poetry is one of the most vital, innovative and influential bodies of literature on the European continent. This volume presents a selection of poems in the original Italian, with introductory material and notes in English.

Dante: Contemporary Perspectives gathers recent and newly commissioned articles on Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), whose epic the Divine Comedy, is one of the landmarks of world literature. The essays in this volume probe current critical assumptions about the celebrated Italian poet, literary theorist, moral philosopher, and political theorist. Dante's attitude towards poetic authority and language comes under scrutiny in several essays, while others examine his political thought and his views on women and gender. Several articles focus exclusively on the Divine Comedy, and, in particular, on its distinctive textual characteristics. There are new readings of two of the Divine Comedy's most important episodes – those of Paolo and Francesca, the Earthly Paradise, and Ulysses – whose significance extends far beyond their immediate contexts. These essays bring into focus Dante's bold narrative innovations and reflections on literature and history.

Recognized as a master of Italian cinema, Vittorio De Sica is perhaps best known and most respected for his critically acclaimed neorealist films of the period 1946-55. As this anthology reveals, however, his production was remarkably multifaceted. The essays included here - some newly commissioned, some reprinted, and others in translation - look at De Sica's varied career from many perspecives.Structured chronologically, the volume begins by introducing readers to De Sica's early popularity as an actor and singer during the years of Italian Fascism, and to his initial directorial efforts before the end of World War II. It was not until the postwar era, however, that De Sica made his mark in film history. Special attention is given to this critical phase of his career, which encompasses the neorealist films that made him famous: "Shoeshine", "Bicycle Thieves", "Miracle in Milan", and "Umberto D."When the neorealist movement waned after 1955, De Sica returned to his roots in Neapolitan comedy for a series of commercially successful films starring Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni. Memorable works from this period include "Two Women" and "Marriage Italian Style" as well as "Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow", which won De Sica an Academy Award in 1965. In one of his final films, "The Garden of the Finzi Continis", he returned to the subject of World War II and to the human tragedy characteristic of his best neorealist productions. This fine anthology offers a comprehensive critical survey that covers the entire scope of De Sica's career, and is an excellent resource for students, critics and film enthusiasts.

Cosmopoiesis means world-making, and in this erudite, polemical book, Professor Mazzotta traces how major medieval and Renaissance thinkers invented their worlds through utopias, magic, science, art, and theatre. The Renaissance is usually read from a Cartesian or Hegelian (via Burckhardt) perspective. It is viewed as a time of individualities or it is studied in terms of disembodied ideas and abstract forms. Mazzotta calls for a new approach: the necessity to study the Renaissance in terms of the ongoing conversation of the arts and sciences. His is an encyclopedic grasp that takes into consideration literature, philosophy, politics, history, and theology.The book's theoretical premise lies in the thought of the eighteenth-century Italian philosopher, Giambattista Vico. Vico's own reading of the Renaissance, available in his New Science, is obliquely, yet clearly reproposed as the alternate interpretive key for opening up the deeper imaginative concerns of this extraordinary period of Western history.By a series of rigorous textual analyses that range from Poliziano to Ariosto, from Machiavelli to Bacon, to Shakespeare and Cervantes, "Cosmopoiesi"s highlights the ongoing dialogue between literature and philosophy (or literature and science, or, in Vichian terms, philology and philosophy) in some of the central texts of the time.In this dialogue across time and the barriers of space, the esthetic world - the world of the pastoral, romances, epics, utopian fictions, the theatre, and the lyric - far from signalling an evasion from history, is steadily and vitally engaged with the most pressing exigencies of the time. Consistently, the analyses conducted in "Cosmopoiesis" come to grips with these exigencies: the power of science, the relationship between politics and science, and the emergence of a new ethics in the midst of the secretive techniques by new elites in their exercise of political power. Above all, these central texts argue for a necessary reconstitution of the unity of knowledge, for the "encyclopedic" compass of the arts and sciences. The retrieval of this unity is made possible by reclaiming a role for the esthetic or contemplative mode of thought which underlies and shapes the most creative achievements in the world of making.

The movie screen has been the forum for many star pairings: Bogart and Bacall, Tracy and Hepburn, and Fellini and Kafka. While this latter combination might seem slightly unexpected or improbable at first sight, Carlo Testa's Masters of Two Arts demonstrates that pairings of famed directors and writers are commonplace in modern Italian cinema. Surprisingly, the study of the interrelation between Italian cinema and European literature has been almost completely neglected in film scholarship. Testa addresses and attempts to correct this oversight with nine in-depth analyses of the one-on-one rapport between an Italian filmmaker and a "classic" name in modern European literature. Looking at combinations such as Pasolini and Sade, Rossellini and Stendhal, and Visconti and Mann amongst others, Testa uses theoretical as well as historical methods, showing how the respective text undergoes not 'adaptation' but full 're-creation' (as defined by Èizenshtein) in a different art form and, even more importantly, in a new cultural context.

Both a passionate denunciation of masculinist readings of the Decameron and a meticulous critique of previous feminist analyses, Marilyn Migiel's A Rhetoric of the Decameron offers a sophisticated re-examination of the representations of women, men, gender identity, sexuality, love, hate, morality, and truth in Boccaccio's masterpiece. The Decameron stages an ongoing, dynamic, and spirited debate about issues as urgent now as in the fourteenth century - a debate that can only be understood if the Decameron's rhetorical objectives and strategies are completely reconceived.Addressing herself equally to those who argue for a proto-feminist Boccaccio - a quasi-liberal champion of women's autonomy - and to those who argue for a positivistically secure historical Boccaccio who could not possibly anticipate the concerns of the twenty-first century, Migiel challenges readers to pay attention to Boccaccio's language, to his pronouns, his passives, his echolalia, his patterns of repetition, and his figurative language. She argues that human experience, particularly in the sexual realm, is articulated differently by the Decameron's male and female narrators, and refutes the notion that the Decameron offers an undifferentiated celebration of Eros. Ultimately, Migiel contends, the stories of the Decameron suggest that as women become more empowered, the limitations on them, including the threat of violence, become more insistent.

Italian Modernism was written in response to the need for an historiographic and theoretical reconsideration of the concepts of Decadentismo and the avant-garde within the Italian critical tradition. Focussing on the confrontation between these concepts and the broader notion of international modernism, the essays in this important collection seek to understand this complex phase of literary and artistic practices as a response to the epistemes of philosophical and scientific modernity at the end of the nineteenth century and in the first three decades of the twentieth.Intellectually provocative, this collection is the first attempt in the field of Italian Studies at a comprehensive account of Italian literary modernism. Each contributor documents how previous critical categories, employed to account for the literary, artistic, and cultural experiences of the period, have provided only partial and inadequate descriptions, preventing a fuller understanding of the complexities and the interrelations among the cultural phenomena of the time.

In The Romance Epics of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso, Jo Ann Cavallo attempts a new interpretation of the history of the renaissance romance epic in northern Italy, focusing on the period's three major chivalric poets. Cavallo challenges previous critical assumptions about the trajectory of the romance genre, especially regarding questions of creative imitation, allegory, ideology, and political engagement.In tracing the development of the romance epic against the historical context of the Ferrarese court and the Italian peninsula, Cavallo moves from a politically engaged Boiardo, whose poem promotes the tenets of humanism, to an individualistic Tasso, who opposed the repressive aspects of the counter-reformation culture he is often thought to represent. Ariosto is read from the vantage of his predecessor Boiardo, and Cavallo describes his cynicism and later mellowing attitude toward the real-world relevance of his and Boiardo's fiction. The Romance Epics of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso is the first critical study to bring together the three poets in a coherent vision that maps changes while uncovering continuities.

Translated here for the first time into English, Sergio Zatti's The Quest for Epic is a selection of studies on the two major poets of the Italian Renaissance, Ludovico Ariosto and Torquato Tasso, by one of the most important literary critics writing in Italy today. An original and challenging work, The Quest for Epic documents the development of Italian narrative from the chivalric romance at the end of the fifteenth century to the genre of epic in the sixteenth century. Zatti focuses on Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, written in the early 1500s, and progresses to Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, written at the end of the century, but also touches briefly on Boiardo, Ariosto's great predecessor at the Estense court in Ferrara, as well as on Pulci, Trissino, and many other Italian writers of the period. Zatti highlights the critical debates over narrative form in the sixteenth century that become signposts on the way to literary modernity and the eventual rise of the modern novel. Albert Russell Ascoli's introduction provides context by mapping Zatti's criticism and situating it among Italian and Anglo-American literary critical studies, making a case for the contribution this book will have for English-language readers.

Widely acclaimed as America's greatest living film director, Martin Scorsese is also, some argue, the pre-eminent Italian American artist. Although he has treated various subjects in over three decades, his most sustained filmmaking and the core of his achievement consists of five films on Italian American subjects - Who's That Knocking at My Door?, Mean Streets, Raging Bull, GoodFellas, and Casino - as well as the documentary Italianamerican. In Gangster Priest Robert Casillo examines these films in the context of the society, religion, culture, and history of Southern Italy, from which the majority of Italian Americans, including Scorsese, derive.Casillo argues that these films cannot be fully appreciated either thematically or formally without understanding the various facets of Italian American ethnicity, as well as the nature of Italian American cinema and the difficulties facing assimilating third-generation artists. Forming a unified whole, Scorsese's Italian American films offer what Casillo views as a prolonged meditation on the immigrant experience, the relationship between Italian America and Southern Italy, the conflicts between the ethnic generations, and the formation and development of Italian American ethnicity (and thus identity) on American soil through the generations. Raised as a Catholic and deeply imbued with Catholic values, Scorsese also deals with certain forms of Southern Italian vernacular religion, which have left their imprint not only on Scorsese himself but also on the spiritually tormented characters of his Italian American films. Casillo also shows how Scorsese interrogates the Southern Italian code of masculine honour in his exploration of the Italian American underworld or Mafia, and through his implicitly Catholic optic, discloses its thoroughgoing and longstanding opposition to Christianity.Bringing a wealth of scholarship and insight into Scorsese's work, Casillo's study will captivate readers interested in the director's magisterial artistry, the rich social history of Southern Italy, Italian American ethnicity, and the sociology and history of the Mafia in both Sicily and the United States.

Despite its undeniable impact on modern literature, there are very few comprehensive studies of literary works produced in Italy from the end of the eighteenth- to the twentieth century. The Invention of Modern Italian Literature examines the methods of select Italian writers and considers their impact on the literary world. Touching upon some of the most prominent and influential writers in Italy over the last three hundred years, Gino Tellini looks at the unique creative processes of each, as well as at the dominant trends that have come to characterize modern Italian literature.Examining different genres such as autobiography, letters, poetry, and the novel, this study stresses the ways in which Italian writers achieved a hybrid of various styles of writing. This cross-genre approach had a significant influence on writers around the world and has come to be one of the defining characteristics of modern literature. Among specific writers and works dealt with are Vittorio Alfieri's autobiography, The Final Letters by Jacopo Ortis by Ugo Foscolo, the theatre of Alessandro Manzoni, the letters of Giacomo Leopardi, the novels of Giovanni Verga, and The Weaver by Giovanni Pascoli.As an investigation of new expressive processes and stylistic experiences, The Invention of Modern Italian Literature situates prominent Italian writers within the context of modern literature.

Despite its undeniable impact on modern literature, there are very few comprehensive studies of literary works produced in Italy from the end of the eighteenth- to the twentieth century. The Invention of Modern Italian Literature examines the methods of select Italian writers and considers their impact on the literary world. Touching upon some of the most prominent and influential writers in Italy over the last three hundred years, Gino Tellini looks at the unique creative processes of each, as well as at the dominant trends that have come to characterize modern Italian literature.Examining different genres such as autobiography, letters, poetry, and the novel, this study stresses the ways in which Italian writers achieved a hybrid of various styles of writing. This cross-genre approach had a significant influence on writers around the world and has come to be one of the defining characteristics of modern literature. Among specific writers and works dealt with are Vittorio Alfieri's autobiography, The Final Letters by Jacopo Ortis by Ugo Foscolo, the theatre of Alessandro Manzoni, the letters of Giacomo Leopardi, the novels of Giovanni Verga, and The Weaver by Giovanni Pascoli.As an investigation of new expressive processes and stylistic experiences, The Invention of Modern Italian Literature situates prominent Italian writers within the context of modern literature.

After Words investigates the ways in which the suicide of a writer informs critical interpretations of his or her works. Suicide is a revision as well as a form of authorship, both on the part of the author, who has written his/her final scene and revised the 'natural' course of his/her life, and on the part of the reader, who must make sense of this final act of writing. Focusing on four twentieth-century Italian writers (Guido Morselli, Amelia Rosselli, Cesare Pavese, and Primo Levi), Elizabeth Leake examines their personal correspondence, diaries, and obituaries as well as popular and academic commemorative writings about them and their works in order to elucidate the ramifications of their suicides for their readership. Arguing that authorial suicide points to the limitations of those critical stances that exclude the author from the practice of reading, Leake's insightful re-reading of these authors and their texts shows that in the aftermath of suicide, an author's life and death themselves become texts to be read.

Widely acclaimed as America's greatest living film director, Martin Scorsese is also, some argue, the pre-eminent Italian American artist. Although he has treated various subjects in over three decades, his most sustained filmmaking and the core of his achievement consists of five films on Italian American subjects - Who's That Knocking at My Door?, Mean Streets, Raging Bull, GoodFellas, and Casino - as well as the documentary Italianamerican. In Gangster Priest Robert Casillo examines these films in the context of the society, religion, culture, and history of Southern Italy, from which the majority of Italian Americans, including Scorsese, derive.Casillo argues that these films cannot be fully appreciated either thematically or formally without understanding the various facets of Italian American ethnicity, as well as the nature of Italian American cinema and the difficulties facing assimilating third-generation artists. Forming a unified whole, Scorsese's Italian American films offer what Casillo views as a prolonged meditation on the immigrant experience, the relationship between Italian America and Southern Italy, the conflicts between the ethnic generations, and the formation and development of Italian American ethnicity (and thus identity) on American soil through the generations. Raised as a Catholic and deeply imbued with Catholic values, Scorsese also deals with certain forms of Southern Italian vernacular religion, which have left their imprint not only on Scorsese himself but also on the spiritually tormented characters of his Italian American films. Casillo also shows how Scorsese interrogates the Southern Italian code of masculine honour in his exploration of the Italian American underworld or Mafia, and through his implicitly Catholic optic, discloses its thoroughgoing and longstanding opposition to Christianity.Bringing a wealth of scholarship and insight into Scorsese's work, Casillo's study will captivate readers interested in the director's magisterial artistry, the rich social history of Southern Italy, Italian American ethnicity, and the sociology and history of the Mafia in both Sicily and the United States.

During the early decades of the twentieth century, Italy produced distinctive innovations in both the intellectual and political realms. On the one hand, Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) and Giovanni Gentile (1875-1944) spearheaded a radical rethinking of historicism and philosophical idealism that significantly reoriented Italian culture. On the other hand, the period witnessed the first rumblings of fascism. Assuming opposite sides, Gentile became the semi-official philosopher of fascism while Croce argued for a renewed liberalism based on 'absolute' historicism.In Historicism and Fascism in Modern Italy, David D. Roberts uses the ideological conflict between Croce and Gentile as a basis for a wider discussion of the interplay between politics and ideas in Italy during the early-twentieth century. Roberts examines the connection between fascism and the modern Italian intellectual tradition, arguing that the relationship not only deepens our understanding of fascism and liberalism but also illuminates ongoing dangers and possibilities in the wider Western world. This set of twelve essays by one of the leading scholars in the field represents an authoritative view of the modern Italian intellectual tradition, its relationship with fascism, and its enduring implications for history, politics, and culture in Italy and beyond.

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 involving renowned writers like Moravia, Da Verona, and Vittorini. Censorship and Literature in Fascist Italy charts the development of Fascist censorship laws and practices, including the creation of the Ministry of Popular Culture and the anti-Semitic crack-down of the late 1930s. Examining the breadth and scope of censorship in Fascist Italy, from Mussolini's role as 'prime censor' to the specific experiences of female writers, this is a fascinating look at the vulnerability of culture under a dictatorship.

The Wrong Door is the first English-language translation of the complete plays of Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991). Bringing together the eleven plays Ginzburg wrote between 1965 and the months before her death, this volume directs attention to Ginzburg's unique talent as a dramatist.Ginzburg's plays, like her novels and short stories, are incisive, finely tuned studies of family drama, of the breakdown of relations between the sexes, and of the tribulations of Italian domestic life. The plays showcase Ginzburg's fearless social commentary, her stark and darkly comic observations of Italian life, and her prescient analyses of the socio-economic changes that have transformed modern Italy. Along the way, Ginzburg creates memorable female characters in a series of fascinating roles. In this fluent and faithful translation, Wendell Ricketts highlights Ginzburg's scalpel-sharp dialogue and lays bare the existential absurdities that lie at the heart of her plays.Including an introduction by the translator and two essays by Ginzburg on her approach to the theatre, The Wrong Door adds a new dimension to the literary portrait of one of Italy's most significant modernist writers.

The Nobel Prize-winning dramatist Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) is undoubtedly one of the most innovative playwrights of the twentieth century and also one of the most complex. While his influence spread throughout modernist and postmodernist works, many first-time audiences and readers are confronted with the difficulty associated with such a radical aesthetic experience. In Living Masks, Umberto Mariani presents a clear and comprehensive introduction of Pirandello's major plays for general readers, students, and scholars new to Pirandello.Functioning as a guide to understanding the fundamental themes of Pirandello's plays, the author also examines the critical, aesthetic, and technical problems associated with these plays. He provides extensive reflection on some of the failings of early and contemporary criticism on Pirandello's works and offers many corrections of interpretative direction that will be significant and helpful to directors and performers. In particular, Mariani presents a deeper understanding and greater appreciation of Pirandello's works as a challenge to the tendency to adapt, and modify them, which drastically deprive the works of their original power and beauty.A concise and accessible introduction to a twentieth-century literary master, Living Masks will be of interest to dramatists, literary scholars, and students and scholars of Italian studies.