Italian Fascism And Anti Fascism

While the historical significance of fascism and anti-fascism is still being hotly debated in Italy and across Europe, this anthology brings to light a wide range of voices--political, literary, and popular--that illuminate more than eighty years of fascism and anti-fascism in Italy. Visit our website for sample chapters!

Bringing together scholars from the Italian and English-speaking worlds, Bosworth and Dogliani's edited book reviews the history of the memory and representation of Fascism after 1945. Ranging in their study from patriotic monuments to sado-masochistic films, the essays here collected ask how and why and when Mussolini's dictatorship mattered after the event, and so provide a fascinating study of the relationship between a traumatic past and the changing present and future.

When the historical significance of fascism and anti-fascism is still being debated in Italy and across Europe, this comprehensive anthology offers an unusually wide-ranging collection of Italian-language documents. It effectively in describes and depicts a wide range of voices--political, literary, and popular--that illuminate Italy's social, political, and cultural history. The contributors unveil previously unavailable documents, including letters from women to Mussolini, and antifascist graffiti from a Nazi prison in Rome.

This socio-political study traces the rise to power of a fascist dictatorship in Italy and its control of the state during World War II. It focuses specifically on the institutions of the fascist state, the suppression of anti-fascism, and the use of propaganda in maintaining the state.

In the last years, the discussion around what is fascism, if this concept can be applied to present forms of politics and if its seeds are still present today, became central in the political debate. This discussion led to a vast reconsideration of the meaning and the experience of fascism in Europe and is changing the ways in which scholars of different generations look at this political ideology and come back to it and it is also changing the ways in which we consider the experience of Italian fascism in the European and global context. The aim of the book is building a general history of Fascism and its historiography through the analysis of 13 different fundamental aspects, which were at the core of Fascist project or of Fascist practices during the regime. Each essay considers a specific and meaningful aspect of the history of Italian fascism, reflecting on it from the vantage point of a case study. The essays thus reinterrogates the history of Fascism to understand in which way Fascism was able to mould the historical context in which it was born, how and if it transformed political, cultural, social elements that were already present in Italy. The themes considered are violence, empire, war, politics, economy, religion, culture, but also antifascism and the impact of Fascism abroad, especially in the Twenties and at the beginnings of the Thirties. The book could be both used for a general public interested in the history of Europe in the interwar period and for an academic and scholarly public, since the essays aim to develop a provocative reflection on their own area of research.

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Minor philofascist publications that appeared in those years are considered as well. Their editorial policy is woven with and presented against the background of the portentous events that shook the world and led to the Second World War."--BOOK JACKET.