Sensibilities Of The Risorgimento

Roberto Romani tackles the moral and religious core of Italian political culture in the years of patriotic struggle 1815-1861.

This book investigates the narrative of nationhood during the Italian Risorgimento and its ability to reach a new and wider audience. In Italy, an extraordinary emotional excitement pervaded the struggle for national independence, suffusing the speeches and actions of patriots. This book shows how this ardour borrowed the tones, figures and spectacular nature of the melodramatic imagination feeding the theatre and literature of the time, and how it could resonate with a largely uneducated audience. An important contribution to the new historiography on the Italian Risorgimento and on nineteenth-century nationalism in Europe, it offers a fresh perspective on the public sphere during the Risorgimento, focusing on the transnational links between political mobilisation and the growth of new media and burgeoning mass culture.

The renewed attention to the origin and shape of nationalist discourses has promoted many excellent studies devoted to examining the rich storehouse of cultural responses produced during and after Risorgimento, the political events that, from 1859 to 1870, led Italy from being a fragmented peninsual to an independent and unified nation-state. However, the assessment of Risorgimento and its myths from the post-World War II era to the present remains, for the most part, unexplored. While it is undeniable that the dramatic economic, social, and political transformations that have characterized Italy from the second half of the twentieth century to the present have altered the role and function of nationalist narratives, it remains equally true that interest in the Risorgimento in modern Italian culture has not diminished.

The Risorgimento was a turbulent and decisive period in the history of Italy. Lucy Riall's engaging account is the first book of its kind on the upheavals of the years between 1815 and 1860, when a series of crises destabilised the states of Restoration Italy and led to the creation of a troubled nation state in 1860. Comprehensive, yet original, this textbook: * Examines the social history of nineteenth century Italy and the social context of political action * Offers a critical overview of the historiography of the topic * Takes account of the most recent literature, especially literature in Italian not normally accessible to students * Adopts a broad thematic approach * Places the Italian experience in a European context

Established as a standard work - covers the whole of Italy not just the Risorgimento itself.

Bringing together the work of a ground-breaking group of scholars working on the Italian Risorgimento to consider how modern Italian national identity was first conceived and constructed politically, the book makes a timely contribution to current discussions about the role of patriotism and the nature of nationalism in present-day Italy.

Providing a comprehensive history of Italy from around 1800 to the present, Italy in the Modern World traces the social and cultural transformations that defined the lives of Italians during the 19th and 20th century. The book focuses on how social relations (class, gender and race), science and the arts shaped the political processes of unification, state building, fascism and the postwar world. Split up into four parts covering the making of Italy, the liberal state, war and fascism, and the republic, the text draws on secondary literature and primary sources in order to synthesize current historiographical debates and provide primary documents for classroom use. There are individual chapters on key topics, such as unification, Italians in the world, Italy in the world, science and the arts, fascism, the World Wars, the Cold War, and Italy in the 21st century, as well as a wealth of useful features for students, including: * Comprehensive bibliographic essays covering each of the four parts * 23 images and 12 maps Italy in the Modern World also firmly places both the nation and its people in a wider global context through a distinctly transnational approach. It is essential reading for all students of modern Italian history.

This book charts the varieties of political moderation in modern European history from the French Revolution to the present day. It explores the attempts to find a middle way between ideological extremes, from the nineteenth-century Juste Milieu and balance of power, via the Third Ways between capitalism and socialism, to the current calls for moderation beyond populism and religious radicalism. The essays in this volume are inspired by the widely-recognized need for a more nuanced political discourse. The contributors demonstrate how the history of modern politics offers a range of experiences and examples of the search for a middle way that can help us to navigate the tensions of the current political climate. At the same time, the volume offers a diagnosis of the problems and pitfalls of Third Ways, of finding the middle between extremes, and of the weaknesses of the moderate point of view.