Intellectual debates surrounding modernity, modernism and fascism continue to be active and hotly contested. In this ambitious book, renowned expert on fascism Roger Griffin analyzes Western modernity and the regimes of Mussolini and Hitler and offers a pioneering new interpretation of the links between these apparently contradictory phenomena.

This book analyzes three works by sexually marginal women sometimes grouped as the "Sapphic Modernists"?Djuna Barnes's Nightwood (1936), Marguerite Yourcenar's Denier du rêve (1934), and Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas (1938)?that engage, directly or indirectly, with fascist politics and ideology.

Using the literary work of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the founder of the Italian Futurist movement and an early associate of Mussolini, the author explores the point of contact between a "progressive" aesthetic practice and a "reactionary" political ideology.

Modernism both influenced and was fascinated by the rhetorical and aesthetic manifestations of fascism. In examining how four artists and writers represented fascist leaders, Annalisa Zox-Weaver aims to achieve a more complex understanding of the modernist political imagination. She examines how photographer Lee Miller, filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, writer Gertrude Stein and journalist Janet Flanner interpret, dramatize and exploit Hitler, Göring and Pétain. Within their own artistic medium, each of these modernists explore confrontations between private and public identity, and historical narrative and the construction of myth. This study makes use of extensive archival material, such as letters, photographs, journals, unpublished manuscripts and ephemera, and includes ten illustrations. This interdisciplinary perspective opens up wider discussions of the relationship between artists and dictators, modernism and fascism, and authority and representation.

Salvador Dalí's autobiography confesses that "Hitler turned me on in the highest," while Sylvia Plath maintains that "every woman adores a Fascist." Susan Sontag's famous observation that art reveals the seamier side of fascism in bondage, discipline, and sexual deviance would certainly appear to be true in modernist and postwar literary texts. How do we account for eroticized representations of fascism in anti-fascist literature, for sexual desire that escapes the bounds of politics?Laura Frost advances a compelling reading of works by D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Jean Genet, Georges Bataille, Marguerite Duras, and Sylvia Plath, paying special attention to undercurrents of enthrallment with tyrants, uniforms, and domination. She argues that the first generation of writers raised within psychoanalytic discourse found in fascism the libidinal unconscious through which to fantasize acts—including sadomasochism and homosexuality—not permitted in a democratic conception of sexuality without power relations. By delineating democracy's investment in a sexually transgressive fascism, an investment that persists to this day, Frost demonstrates how politics enters into fantasy. This provocative and closely-argued book offers both a fresh contribution to modernist literature and a theorization of fantasy.

Fascism and Modernist Literature in Norway illuminates the connections between literature and politics in interwar Europe. Focusing on the works of Nobel Prize-winning novelist Knut Hamsun and modernist poets Asmund Sveen and Rolf Jacobsen, all of whom collaborated with the Nazi regime during the occupation of Norway in World War II, and those of the anti-fascist novelist and critic Sigurd Hoel, Dean Krouk reveals key aspects of the modernist literary imagination in Norway. In their writings, Hamsun, Sveen, and Jacobsen expressed their discontent with twentieth-century European modernity, which they perceived as overly rationalized or nihilistic. Krouk explains how fascism offered these writers a seductive utopian vision that intersected with the countercultural and avant-garde aspects of their literary works, while Hoel’s critical analysis of Nazism extended to a questioning of all patriarchal forms of authority. Krouk’s readings of their works serve as a timely reminder to us all of the dangers of fascism.

This book examines how the work of Mario Sironi shaped the political myths of Italian Fascism.