Fascist Modernities : Italy, 1922-1945.
Title:
Fascist Modernities : Italy, 1922-1945.
Author:
Ben-Ghiat, Ruth.
ISBN:
9780520938052
Personal Author:
Edition:
1st ed.
Physical Description:
1 online resource (332 pages)
Series:
Studies on the History of Society and Culture ; v.42
Studies on the History of Society and Culture
Contents:
Cover -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- INTRODUCTION -- 1 TOWARD A FASCIST CULTURE -- Politics and Patronage in Italian Fascist Culture -- Taste Wars I: Generational Politics and Fascist Aesthetics -- Taste Wars II: Anxieties of Influence -- In Search of Modernity: Italians Abroad, 1929-34 -- 2 NARRATING THE NATION -- Toward a New Italian Literature -- Critics and the Construction of Literary Identity -- The Realist Novel and the Search for Moral Change -- Fascist Literature and the Fiction of the Unpolitical -- The Ethnic as National: Alvaro's Alternative -- 3 ENVISIONING MODERNITY -- Style and Identity: Creating the National Film -- Blasetti, Camerini, Matarazzo: Three Visions of a Different Modernity -- The Development of Fascist Film Policy, 1933-35 -- 4 CLASS DISMISSED: FASCISM'S POLITICS OF YOUTH -- Toward a Fascist Modernity: Three Voices for Change -- The Discipline of Revolution -- 5 CONQUEST AND COLLABORATION -- Fascist Modernity and Colonial Conquest -- Between Expansion and Autarchy: Italian Culture in the Axis Years -- Aryans and Others: The Fascist War against the Jews -- Politics and Identity in Fascist Youth Culture, 1936-39 -- 6 THE WARS OF FASCISM -- A Culture of War, 1940-43 -- Generations at War -- Other Italies, Other Modernities -- EPILOGUE -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z.
Abstract:
Ruth Ben-Ghiat's innovative cultural history of Mussolini's dictatorship is a provocative discussion of the meanings of modernity in interwar Italy. Eloquent, pathbreaking, and deft in its use of a broad range of materials, this work argues that fascism appealed to many Italian intellectuals as a new model of modernity that would resolve the contemporary European crisis as well as long-standing problems of the national past. Ben-Ghiat shows that-at a time of fears over the erosion of national and social identities-Mussolini presented fascism as a movement that would allow economic development without harm to social boundaries and national traditions. She demonstrates that although the regime largely failed in its attempts to remake Italians as paragons of a distinctly fascist model of mass society, twenty years of fascism did alter the landscape of Italian cultural life. Among younger intellectuals in particular, the dictatorship left a legacy of practices and attitudes that often continued under different political rubrics after 1945.
Local Note:
Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2017. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.
Genre:
Electronic Access:
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