Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922-1945 (Studies on the History of Society and Culture) (Volume 42)

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. Illustrations: 17 b/w photographs Contents......Page 6 List of Illustrations......Page 8 Acknowledgments......Page 10 Introduction......Page 12 1 Toward a Fascist Culture......Page 28 Politics and Patronage in Italian Fascist Culture......Page 31 Taste Wars I: Generational Politics and Fascist Aesthetics......Page 40 Taste Wars II: Anxieties of Infuence......Page 44 In Search of Modernity: Italians Abroad, 1929–34......Page 48 2 Narrating the Nation......Page 57 Toward a New Italian Literature......Page 59 Critics and the Construction of Literary Identity......Page 62 The Realist Novel and the Search for Moral Change......Page 66 Fascist Literature and the Fiction of the Unpolitical......Page 72 The Ethnic as National: Alvaro’s Alternative......Page 75 3 Envisioning Modernity......Page 81 Style and Identity: Creating the National Film......Page 85 Blasetti, Camerini, Matarazzo: Three Visions of a Different Modernity......Page 91 The Development of Fascist Film Policy, 1933 –35......Page 99 4 Class Dismissed: Fascism’s Politics of Youth......Page 104 Toward a Fascist Modernity: Three Voices for Change......Page 110 The Discipline of Revolution......Page 118 5 Conquest and Collaboration......Page 134 Fascist Modernity and Colonial Conquest......Page 136 Between Expansion and Autarchy: Italian Culture in the Axis Years......Page 142 Aryans and Others: The F ascist War against the Jews......Page 159 Politics and Identity in Fascist Youth Culture, 1936 –39......Page 168 6 The Wars of Fascism......Page 182 A Culture of War, 1940 – 43......Page 185 Generations at War......Page 191 Other Italies, Other Modernities......Page 198 Epilogue......Page 213 Notes......Page 224 Bibliography......Page 288 A......Page 316 B......Page 317 C......Page 318 D......Page 319 F......Page 320 I......Page 321 M......Page 322 P......Page 324 R......Page 325 S......Page 326 W......Page 327 Z......Page 328

Ruth Ben-Ghiat's Fascist Modernities: Italy 1922-1945 is among the very best analyses of Fascist culture in any language. Based on a truly amazing amount of research, this volume traces the first stirrings of a generation of Italian writers and film directors who would pass from Fascism through the Resistance to militancy in the Communist, Socialist, Action, and Christian Democratic parties and then beyond into the new Italy of the 'economic miracle.'—Alexander De Grand, author of Bottai e la cultura fascista

A superb and original work of scholarship, Fascist Modernities give us a startling new picture of the Italian fascist period and its cultural politics, as well as remarkable new analyses of Italian fascist anti-Semitism and of the relation between Italy's colonial aspirations and conquests and its modernizing schemes. Most impressive of all, Ben-Ghiat single-handedly changes our understanding of the place of realism in Italian literary history and in twentieth-century cinema.—Barbara Spackman, author of Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology and Social Fantasy in Italy

Ruth Ben-Ghiat's book is an important contribution to the history of fascist culture, showing the complex ways in which fascism used intellectuals and intellectuals used fascism.—Alexander Stille, author of Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian-Jewish Families Under Fascism

New York Review of Books

More than a history of Fascist culture,a richly documented and thorough chronicle of the relationship between the regime and culture.

"Ruth Ben-Ghiat's innovative cultural history of Mussolini's dictatorship is a provocative discussion of the meanings of modernity in interwar Italy. 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."--BOOK JACKET. This cultural history of Mussolini's dictatorship discusses the meanings of modernity in interwar Italy. The work argues that fascism appealed to many Italian intellectuals as a new model of modernity that would resolve the European and national crises