Autobiographical Cultures In Post War Italy

After the Second World War, two contrasting political movements became increasingly active in Italy - the communist and feminist movements. In this book, Walter Baroni uses autobiographical life-writing from both movements key protagonists to shed new light on the history of these movements and more broadly the similarities and differences between political activists in post-war Italy.

Transmissions of Memory: Echoes, Traumas and Nostalgia in Post-World War II Italian Culture discusses cultural products—films, poetry, fiction, architectural buildings, autobiographical writing, and social media—to individuate through them the dynamics of memory. The field of analysis is Italian culture from World War II to the contemporary times, and the volume has in a gendered approach one of its focuses, offering an encompassing view on cultural memory and highlighting the similarities between gendered revisitation and revisitation of the past. The volume is divided into three sections: cultural transmissions, fractured memories, and nostalgia. In the chapters herewith the study of memory through these forms hints at a sense of transformation and often enrichment or resilience, individual or collective, that values more the present and the future rather than the past.

From the 1930s to the 50s in Italy commercial cultural products were transformed by new reproductive technologies and ways of marketing and distribution, and the appetite for radio, films, music and magazines boomed. This book uses new evidence to explore possible continuities between the uses of mass culture before and after World War II.

Critical interest in biography and autobiography has never been higher. However, while life-writing flourishes in the UK, in Italy it is a less prominent genre. The twelve essays collected here are written against this backdrop, and address issues in biographical and autobiographical writing in Italy from the later nineteenth century to the present, with a particular emphasis on the interplay between individual lives and life-writing and the wider social and political history of Italy. The majority of essays focus on well-known writers (D'Annunzio, Svevo, Bontempelli, Montale, Levi, Calvino, Eco and Fallaci), and their varying anxieties about autobiographical writing in their work. This picture is rounded out by a series of studies of similar themes in lesser known figures: the critic Enrico Nencioni, the Welsh-Italian painter Llewellyn Lloyd and Italian writers and journalists covering the Spanish Civil War. The contributors, all specialists in their fields, are Antonella Braida, Charles Burdett, Jane Everson, John Gatt Rutter, Robert Gordon, Gwyn Griffith, Peter Hainsworth, Martin McLaughlin, Gianni Oliva, Giuliana Pieri, and Jon Usher. The volume is dedicated to John Woodhouse, on his seventieth birthday, and concludes with a bibliography of his writings.

The essays included in this collection examine issues such as identity and ideology which are at play in the female autobiography practice, along with the problematicity that these trigger in terms of self-representation and traditional formal boundaries. The women writers analyzed here through mainly historical, literary, feminist and psychoanalytic lenses cover a long period in the history of Italy, spanning from the Fascist era to our time. In an attempt to organize and connect these texts which are chronologically far apart, we have divided our contributions into two main parts. The first, “Shapes of Ideology,” includes authors interacting primarily with political ideology in a way that eventually entails the challenge of the official “technologies of gender” (De Lauretis, 1987) and implicitly, a reflection on the gendered identity. In the second part, “Reconsidering ideology, negotiating autobiography,” while the political ideology is not completely excluded, it becomes however something more internalized and relevant to the writers’ quest for identity. Such process bears consequences with respect to the canon of autobiography, as authors experiment with new forms of autobiographical narratives and readers become more and more an integral component of this personal endeavor.

Offers a detailed and personal exploration of the Italian immigrant experience in Calgary, Canada, focusing on the migration and resettlement of Italians who came to Calgary after WWII and the cultural transformation that occurred in this urban, industrial, and often hostile environment. Draws on 48 in-depth interviews with first- generation Italian immigrants, and includes b & w historical and contemporary photos. Information on the author is not given. Canadian card order number: C99-911246-5. Distributed by Raincoast Distribution Services. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Italian immigrants began to settle in Wales at the turn of the 19th century, opening hundreds of coffee shops, particularly in the South Wales Valleys. Despite this, such immigrants remain a largely unexplored case study in the history of Italian immigration to the UK. This book uses a variety of unexplored sources, and engages with the broader academic debate on migration, identity, and the trans-generational transmission of memory, to describe the emergence of Welsh-Italian narratives and the formation of a distinctive, yet complex, Welsh-Italian identity. It follows a chronological journey, moving from the interwar period, a time in which Italians in Wales were generally regarded as fully established and integrated, through to the Second World War, a time when Italian identity became problematic and resulted in nearly seventy years of ‘silencing’, up until the first decade of the 21st century, where a mixture of commemorative events and cultural initiatives prompted the emergence of Welsh-Italian narratives. The book begins by studying photographic representations of Italians in Wales during the interwar period, using photographs available in local history books, private collections and history books. The analysis of the photographic material draws from the work of scholars such as Sontag, Noble, Hirsh and Bate on photo-textual analysis, to show how photographs can reveal understudied, yet important, aspects of Italian migrant identity and of the relationship with the host community in the period that preceded the Second World War. The book then examines how the events of the Second World War destabilised the images of family, sociability and integration suggested by these photographs, and how such events aggravated tensions between host and migrant cultures. It continues by investigating recent Welsh-Italian texts where, in revisiting the past and the experience of their ancestors, the authors bring different circumstances and personal factors into play determining the degree to which they reconcile their dual identity. It concludes with a comparison between these ‘narratives of belonging’ and the representation of the Italian migrant experience in Anglo-Welsh literature.