Following the more theoretical first installment of New Perspectives in Italian Cultural Studies devoted to Definitions, Theory, and Accented Practices, the second volume of New Perspectives deals with practicing cultural studies by offering articles that are valuable for both scholars of Italian studies and students interested in a cultural studies approach. Divided in four sections, the articles included offer complex approaches to literature, film, the visual arts, and a particular moment in Italian history with which Italians are still coming to terms, fascism. The essays cover about two hundred years of Italian cultures dealing with the construction of national myths, the role of soccer in contemporary debates, the contemporary success of mystery novels, and issues of race and crime in fascist Italy. Contributors look at film through the lens of fashion history and the particular Italian use of dubbing that continues even today. Place and memory are the topics of a number of essays that also allow for an interpretation of Italian culture inAmericans' imagination. This volume contains a multifaceted representation of Italy and invites additional discussion on the complexity of representing cultures

Following the more theoretical first installment of New Perspectives in Italian Cultural Studies devoted to Definitions, Theory, and Accented Practices, the second volume of New Perspectives deals with practicing cultural studies by offering articles that are valuable for both scholars of Italian studies and students interested in a cultural studies approach. Divided in four sections, the articles included offer complex approaches to literature, film, the visual arts, and a particular moment in Italian history with which Italians are still coming to terms, fascism. The essays cover about two hundred years of Italian cultures dealing with the construction of national myths, the role of soccer in contemporary debates, the contemporary success of mystery novels, and issues of race and crime in fascist Italy. Contributors look at film through the lens of fashion history and the particular Italian use of dubbing that continues even today. Place and memory are the topics of a number of essays that also allows for an interpretation of Italian culture inAmericans’ imagination. This volume contains a multifaceted representation of Italy and invites additional discussion on the complexity of representing cultures

New Perspectives in Italian Cultural Studies. Volume 1: Definitions, Theory, and Accented Practices is a collection of essays that identifies a number of different approaches in cultural studies and in Italian cultural studies in particular. It highlights that history of cultural studies and new developments in the field as well focuses on practicing cultural studies with essays devoted to Italian hip hop culture, postcolonial Italy and queer diaspora, Occidentalism in Japan, Italian racism and colonialism.

The late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries witness significant advancement in the production and, crucially, the consumption of culture in Italy. During the long process towards and beyond Italy becoming a nation-state in 1861, new modes of writing and performing – the novel, the self-help manual, theatrical improvisation – develop in response to new practices and technologies of production and distribution. Key to the emergence of an inclusive national audience in Italy is, however, the audience itself. A wide and varied body of consumers of culture, animated by the notion of an Italian national cultural identity, create in this period an increasingly complex demand for different cultural products. This body is energized by the wider access to education and to the Italian language brought about by educational reforms, by growing urbanization, by enhanced social mobility, and by transcultural connections across European borders. This book investigates this process, analyzing the ways in which authors, composers, publishers, performers, journalists, and editors engage with the anxieties and aspirations of their diverse audiences. Fourteen essays by specialists in the field, exploring individual contexts and cases, demonstrate how interests related to gender, social class, cultural background and practices of reading and spectatorship, exert determining influence upon the production of culture in this period. They describe how women, men, and children from across the social and regional strata of the emerging nation contribute incrementally but actively to the idea and the growing reality of an Italian national cultural life. They show that from newspapers to salon performances, from letters to treatises in social science, from popular novels to literary criticism, from philosophical discussions to opera theaters, there is evidence in Italy in this period of unprecedented participation, crossing academic and popular cultures, in the formation of a national audience in Italy. This cultural transformation later produces the mass culture in Italy which underpins the major movements of the twentieth century and which undergoes new challenges and reformulations in the Italy we know today.

This book highlights the centrality of the autobiographical enterprise to Italian women’s writing through the twentieth century—a century that has frequently been referred to as the century of the self. Ursula Fanning addresses the thorny issue of essentialism potentially involved in underlining links between women’s writing and autobiographical modes, and ultimately rejects it in favor of an argument based on the cultural, linguistic, and literary marginalization of women writers within the Italian context. It is concerned with Italian women writers’ various ways of grappling with constructions of subjectivity throughout the century and sets out to explore them. Fanning reads autobiographical writing as subject to many of the same constraints as fiction and, in doing so, draws attention to the significance of the recurring use of the terms “pure” and “impure” in many critical and theoretical discussions of the autobiographical (where “pure” is used to suggest a truthful representation of a life, while “impure” suggests the messy undertaking of mixing lived experience with fiction). Recurring patterns and paradigms are found in the works of the various writers considered (eighteen in all), and these paradigms are analyzed through close readings of their works. These close readings offer insights into approaches to the constructions of subjectivity in the narratives and are informed by feminist theories. The chapters focus on selves in relationship, taking their lead from the patterns unfolding in the writers’ work, hence the subjects are constructed as daughters (with different views of the self in relation to fathers and mothers), within the confines of the romantic relationship (which involves reconsiderations and rewritings of the romance plot), as maternal subjects, and as writers (with an eye on their relationship to the literary canon, as well as to the relationship with readers). This book argues that there is such a thing as gendered subjectivity and that its constructions may be traced through the texts analyzed.

In this monograph, Gregory M. Pell provides a full-length study on the poetry of Davide Rondoni, one of Italy’s most active contemporary writers and thinkers. This book includes comparative studies of Jorie Graham, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Charles Wright, John Ashbery, Patrizia Fazzi, and Mario Luzi. As the first book in English on Davide Rondoni’s poetry, this study explores how the Italian poet deals with art, and the places of art, in a way that transcends the notion of ekphrasis (or, verbal representation of pictorial art) to see poetry as the transcription of an experience with art, thus becoming a sort of anti-ekphrasis, or an atmospheric ekphrasis. The social and religious aspects of art take precedence over aesthetic concerns, without discounting them, in Rondoni’s unsentimental poetry, which takes the form of recitative theatrical monologues. Thus, art becomes more than simple visual representation or the subject of an art history catalogue. Instead, in certain poets, such as Rondoni, we experience life through art’s complete process: from the artist’s originary idea to the work’s execution to our interaction with it in the here and now.

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: The Artist and His Politics explores the politics of the leader of the Futurist art movement. Emerging in Italy in 1909, Futurism sought to propel Italy into the modern world, and is famously known for outlandish claims to want to destroy museums and libraries in order to speed this transition. Futurism, however, also had a much darker political side. It glorified war as the solution to many of Italy’s ills, and was closely tied to the Fascist Regime. In this book, Ialongo focuses on Marinetti as the chief determinant of Futurist politics and explores how a seemingly revolutionary art movement, at one point having some support among revolutionary left-wing movements in Italy, could eventually become so intimately tied to the repressive Fascist regime. Ialongo traces Marinetti’s politics from before the foundation of Futurism, through the Great War, and then throughout the twenty-year Fascist dictatorship, using a wide range of published and unpublished sources. Futurist politics are presented within the wider context of developments in Italy and Europe, and Ialongo further highlights how Marinetti’s political choices influenced the art of his movement.