Mapping Post War Italian Literature

In the aftermath of the reconstruction period immediately after the Second World War, Italy experienced an unprecedented and unexpected phase of economic development, which transformed it from a traditionally agrarian and impoverished country into one of Europe's most industrialized nations. The idea, treasured to this day by many Italians, of this period as a sort of 'golden age' has increasingly been called into question by historical research that has delved into the deeper, persistent contradictions of Italian society at the time. Mapping Post-War Italian Literature embraces the boom years and their legacy, exploring the long-lasting impact of post-war Italy's urbanization and modernization on the imagination of Italian writers. It does so by looking at how socio-spatial transformations affecting the main industrial cities of the North - Milan and Turin - as well as the provinces (a space generally deemed 'peripheral') and the national landscape have been conceptualized in contemporary novels and travel accounts. The selected texts cross genre boundaries and reflect an array of authorial positions, giving a compelling and multifaceted account of the post-war historical transition.

Broken Time, Fragmented Space: A Cultural Map for Post-war Italy examines how the artists and intellectuals of post-war Italy dealt with the 'shameful' heritage of their fascist upbringing and education by trying to craft a new cultural identity for themselves and the country. The continuities between the culture of the fascist and post-fascist periods were, however, far greater than what intellectuals were ready to admit, creating an uncomfortable, sometimes schizophrenic relation to time, as a painful urge to erase the past. Drawing on a variety of critical approaches, Torriglia investigates the efforts to reconstruct a personal as well as a collective self by analyzing both canonical and lesser-known cinematic and literary texts. Organized around four main themes - the use of language, the interaction between personal and public spheres, the perceptual categories of history and memory, and the reconstruction of the female identity - the study also includes historical introductions and sociological commentary that provides an extensive and captivating picture of the cultural production in 1950s Italy, a period that has not yet been extensively studied.

This book is about the presence of utopian and dystopian elements in the Italian literary landscape. It focuses on four authors that are representatives of the various positions in the Italian cultural debate: Pasolini, Calvino, Sanguineti, and Volponi. What did concepts like utopia and dystopia mean for these authors? Is it possible to separate utopia from dystopia? What is the role of science fiction in this debate? This book answers these questions, proposing an original interpretation of utopia and of the social role of literature. The book also takes into consideration four of the most influential literary journals in Italy: Officina, il menabò, il verri, and Nuovi Argomenti, that played a central role in the cultural and political debate on utopia in Italy.

This book investigates the representation of the Axis War – the wars of aggression that Fascist Italy fought in North Africa, Greece, the Soviet Union, and the Balkans, from 1940 to 1943 – in three decades of Italian literature. Building on an innovative and interdisciplinary methodology, which combines memory studies, historiography, thematic criticism, and narratology, this book explores the main topoi, themes, and masterplots of an extensive corpus of novels and memoirs to assess the contribution of literature to the reshaping of Italian memory and identity after the end of Fascism. By exploring the influence that public memory exercises on literary depictions and, in return, the contribution of literary texts to the formation and dissemination of a discourse about the past, the book examines to what extent Italian literature helped readers form an ethical awareness of the crimes committed by members of their national community during World War II.

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.

Providing the most complete record possible of texts by Italian writers active after 1900, this annotated bibliography covers over 4,800 distinct editions of writings by some 1,700 Italian authors. Many entries are accompanied by useful notes that provide information on the authors, works, translators, and the reception of the translations. This book includes the works of Pirandello, Calvino, Eco, and more recently, Andrea Camilleri and Valerio Manfredi. Together with Robin Healey’s Italian Literature before 1900 in English Translation, also published by University of Toronto Press in 2011, this volume makes comprehensive information on translations from Italian accessible for schools, libraries, and those interested in comparative literature.