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“Mysterious Flames” - Fascism, Identity, And Mass Culture In Umberto Eco

by Marco Ruggieri

~~65,26€~~ 58,73€ 10% OFF

 Starting from an analysis of The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, this book explores two underexamined aspects of Umberto Ecoâ€™s work: first, the representation of Italian Fascism and its influence on national identity; second, subjectivity and individual identity, which Eco addressed only in a fragmented way in his theoretical writings.
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Queering The South - Case Studies With Emma Dante

by Alice Parrinello

~~65,26€~~ 58,73€ 10% OFF

 This book offers a queer reading of the oeuvre of Sicilian director Emma Dante, winner of the 2026 Theatre Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale. It contextualises Dante’s work within the longstanding anti-meridionalist North-South binary that has dogged Italy history and culture, and argues that Dante exemplifies a Southern and queer epistemology that unsettles this divide and revalorises the South. The book examines this alternative understanding of the South in Dante’s work, focusing in turn on the poetics of human and nonhuman kinship, oddkin, and queer families; haunting and temporality; and Southern cultural bodies (the Opera dei Pupi and the femminelle). Throughout, it situates Dante’s production within a broader genealogy of cultural texts and practices that are also both queer and Southern, drawing connections with works by artists such as Letizia Battaglia, Liliana Cavani, Jolanda Insana, Curzio Malaparte, Fabio Mollo, Elsa Morante, and Ferzan Özpetek. Working on and with Emma Dante - on her oeuvre and the expansive cultural network it generates - the book ultimately argues that queerness, far from being the marginal ‘other’ of the Italian South, is situated at the core of its cultural, theoretical, and epistemological articulation.
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Opera Aperta - Italian Electronic Literature From The 1960s To The Present

by Emanuela Patti

64,40€ + 10% CARD

 Runner-up in the 2023 N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature from the Electronic Literature Organization «At last, here is a book written by an Italian about the homeopathic but essential role that Italian artists, and among them, important writers, have played to introduce the digital transformation to Italians. Long before government or business, and least of all educators, took notice, artists, as was their wont for centuries, were the first to reveal the potential of the new technologies. Emanuela Patti not only pays them a long overdue tribute, but along the way revisits with care and engaging style the key features of that transformation. A wonderful read!» (Professor Derrick de Kerckhove, University of Toronto) «We were missing a systematic survey of e-literary arts in Italy. Emanuela Patti has filled that void. Indeed, her study is much more than a survey: it brilliantly connects semiotic theories of open textuality to the profound techno-cultural transformations of socio-political life from the 1960s to the present, from experimental writing to popular culture.» (Professor Massimo Riva, Brown University) In 1962, Umberto Eco published Opera aperta, setting the ground for a new wave of creative experimentation across the arts and media. The concept of «open work» informed by systems theory, cybernetics, relativism, pragmatism and other influential disciplines of the time was used by Eco to reconsider the work of art as a site for interactivity, collaboration and intermediality. Starting from this perspective, this book reconstructs the history of Italian electronic literature, looking at creative practices across literature, electronic and digital media from the early days of computers to the social media age. It examines how Italian writers, poets, literary critics and intellectuals have responded to each phase of the digital revolution, by enacting «poetics of openness» and «politics of intermediality». Case studies include Nanni Balestrini, Gianni Toti, Italo Calvino, Caterina Davinio, Wu Ming, Michela Murgia, Francesco Pecoraro, Roberto Saviano, Tommaso Pincio, Fabio Viola, Fabrizio Venerandi and Enrico Colombini. In some cases, literary experimentation with new technologies has taken a clear polemical stance towards mass media, globalisation, information society and late capitalism, in order to challenge and/or reconfigure artistic or social ontologies. In others, digital technologies have been used to enhance and extend the parameters and «languages» of literature.
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Queer(Ing) Gender In Italian Womens Writing - Maraini, Sapienza, Morante

by Maria Morelli

65,32€ + 10% CARD

 QUEER(ING) GENDER IN ITALIAN WOMENâ€™S WRITINGS is the first study of its kind to systematically use queer theory as a theoretical framework of analysis in Italian literature in general, and in Italian womenâ€™s writings in particular.
ENGLISH

Italian Chimeras - Narrating Italy Through The Writing Of Sebastiano Vassalli

by Meriel Tulante

72,61€ + 10% CARD

 Sebastiano Vassalli (1941â€"2015) engaged in an ambitious project to narrate Italy, the nation, its people and its pathologies. For Vassalli, chimeras are the myths that have repeatedly ensnared the nation, resulting in the social and political dysfunctions he denounces. This book represents the first study of Vassalliâ€™s works as a whole.
ENGLISH

Queer Ventennio - Italian Fascism, Homoerotic Art, And The Nonmodern In The Modern

by John Champagne

60,09€ + 10% CARD

 Given fascist proscriptions against homosexuality, a surprising number of artists under Mussolinis regime were queer. Exploring the contribution of Italy to our understanding of both the history of homosexuality and European modernism, this ground-breaking study analyses three queer modernists writer Giovanni Comisso, painter and writer Filippo de Pisis, and painter Corrado Cagli. None self-identified as fascists; none, however, were consistent critics of the regime. All understood their own sexuality via the idea of the primitive a discourse fascism also employed in its efforts to secure consent for the dictatorship. What happens when we return to these men and their work minus the assumption that our most urgent task is identifying their fascist tendencies or political quietism? Variously infantilized, pathologized, marginalized, and stigmatized, treated as both cause and effect of fascism, queer ventennio artists are an easy target, not brave or selfless or savvy enough to see their common struggle with fascisms other victims. Revisiting their works and lives with an eye toward neither rehabilitation nor condemnation allows us to ponder more carefully the relationship between art and politics, how homophobia has structured art criticism, the need to further bring queer perspectives to Italian cultural analysis, and how such men disrupt our sense of modern homo/heterosexual definition.
ENGLISH

Era Mio Padre - Italian Terrorism Of The Anni Di Piombo In The Postmemorials Of Victims Relatives

63,67€ + 10% CARD

 Italian political terrorism of the 1970s has produced in its aftermath a rich body of memorial writing, created not only by victims or perpetrators but also by the secondary victims of violence, often children of the dead, who many years after their loss ask why their parents or relatives were chosen as targets, what it means for them personally and for the history of the Italian anni di piombo. This volume brings together a body of essays that explore this field of «postmemorial» writing, a field that extends the scope of memory studies, particularly in relation to political violence, and especially when those memories are fragile and indirect. The book analyses the work of victims children such as Mario Calabresi, Benedetta Tobagi, Luca Tarantelli and Massimo Coco, exploring how these authors and others have narrated their unique experiences, from their distant memories of their fathers each assassinated by different Italian terrorist groups to their more recent struggles to deal with state institutions ill-equipped to respond to, or indifferent to, their plight. It further examines how their «postmemorial» works have contributed to a new relationship between history and personal memory in Italy. All of these writers, impelled by a sense of marginalization, frustration and sometimes anger to become actors and witnesses against their own will, have added their own indispensable tiles to the mosaic of a national and collective memory of the 1970s that is still largely unresolved in Italy today.
ENGLISH

Fictions Of Appetite - Alimentary Discourses In Italian Modernist Literature

by Enrico Cesaretti

69,36€ + 10% CARD

 Fictions of Appetite explores and investigates the aesthetic significance of images of food, appetite and consumption in a body of modernist literature published in Italian between 1905 and 1939. The corpus examined includes novels, short stories, poems, essays and plays by F.T. Marinetti, Aldo Palazzeschi, Massimo Bontempelli, Paola Masino and Luigi Pirandello. The book underlines the literary relevance and symbolic implications of the «culinary sign», suggesting a link between the crisis of language and subjectivity usually associated with modernism and figures of consumption and corporeal self-obliteration in «alimentary» discourse. In revisiting these works under label of modernism, which has traditionally been shunned in the Italian critical field, the volume brings critical discourse on early twentieth-century Italian literature closely into line with that of other Western literatures. The author argues that an alimentary perspective not only sheds striking new light on each of the texts examined, but also illustrates the signifying power of the culinary sign, its relations to the aesthetic sphere and its prominent role in the construction of a modernist sensibility.
ENGLISH

New Visions Of The Child In Italian Cinema

68,17€ + 10% CARD

 The figure of the child has long been a mainstay of Italian cinema, conventionally interpreted as a witness of adult shortcomings, a vessel of innocence, hope and renewal, or an avatar of nostalgia for the (cinematic) past. New Visions of the Child in Italian Cinema challenges these settled categories of interpretation and reconsiders the Italian canon as it relates to the child. The book draws on a growing body of new work in the history and theory of children on film and is the first volume to bring together and to apply some of these new approaches to Italian cinema. Chapters in the book address aspects of industry and spectatorship and the varied film psychology of infancy, childhood and adolescence, as well as genres as diverse as silent cinema, contemporary teen movies, melodrama and film ethnography. The contributors engage with a wide range of modes and theories including neorealism, auteurism and contemporary postfeminism. The book maps out new roles for gender, the transnational, loss and mourning, and filmmaking itself, leading to a revised understanding of the child in Italian cinema.
ENGLISH

Eccentricity And Sameness - Discourses On Lesbianism And Desire Between Women In Italy, 1860s1930s

by Charlotte Ross

76,25€ + 10% CARD

 Dispelling widespread views that female same-sex desire is virtually absent from Italian literature and cultural production in the modern era, this groundbreaking study demonstrates that narratives of lesbianism are significantly more numerous than has been previously asserted. Focusing on texts published between 1860 and 1939, the author traces and analyses the evolution of discourses on female same-sex desire in and across a wide variety of genres, whether popular bestsellers, texts with limited distribution and subject to censorship, or translations from other languages. All the works are considered in relation to broader socio-cultural contexts. The analysis uncovers a plurality of different sources for these narratives of lesbianism and desire between women, showing how different layers of discourse emerge from or are reworked in and across several genres. From scientists who condemned the immoral and degenerate nature of «Sapphic» desire, to erotic publications that revelled in the pleasures of female same-sex intimacy, to portrayals of homoerotic desire by female writers that call (more or less obliquely) for its legitimization, these texts open up important new perspectives on discourses of sexuality in modern Italy.
ENGLISH

Italian Political Cinema - Public Life, Imaginary, And Identity In Contemporary Italian Film

42,20€ + 10% CARD

 Despite recent societal anti-political sentiments, Italian cinema has continued to address politics, including reflections on public life, memory, and national identity. This is done via (1) thematic approaches discussing contemporary political film, (2) analyses of prominent directors currently engaged in filone, and (3) case studies of selected films.
ENGLISH

Staging The Fascist War - The Ministry Of Popular Culture And Italian Propaganda On The Home Front, 19381943

by Luigi Petrella

68,17€ + 10% CARD

 Historians regard the Italian home front during the Second World War as an observation post from which to study the relationship between Fascism and society during the years of the collapse of the Mussolini regime. Yet the role of propaganda in influencing that relationship has received little attention. The media played a crucial role in setting the stage for the regimes image under the intense pressures of wartime. The Ministry of Popular Culture, under Mussolinis supervision, maintained control not only over the press, but also over radio, cinema, theatre, the arts and all forms of popular culture. When this Fascist media narrative was confronted by the sense of vulnerability among civilians following the first enemy air raids in June 1940, it fell apart like a house of cards. Drawing on largely unexplored sources such as government papers, personal memoirs, censored letters and confidential reports, Staging the Fascist War analyses the crisis of the regime in the years from 1938 to 1943 through the perspective of a propaganda programme that failed to bolster Fascist myths at a time of total war.
ENGLISH

Destination Italy - Representing Migration In Contemporary Media And Narrative

76,25€ + 10% CARD

 Due to its strategic Mediterranean position, Italy is a crossroad of complex transnational movements, a unique context for the study of contemporary migration. This book brings together scholars from migration studies, linguistics, media, literature and film studies, as well practitioners and activists, to explore Italy as a destination country.
ENGLISH

Modernitalia - Edited By Francesca Santovetti

by Jeffrey Schnapp

77,65€ + 10% CARD

 Provides a map of the Italian twentieth century in the form of twelve essays. This volume explores the metaphysics of speed, futurist and dada typography, real and imaginary forms of architecture, shifting regimes of mass spectacle, the iconography of labour, and exhibitions as modes of public mobilization and persuasion.
ENGLISH

Postmodern Impegno - Impegno Postmoderno - Ethics And Commitment In Contemporary Italian Culture - Etica E Engagement Nella Cultura Italiana Contemporanea

62,28€ + 10% CARD

 This book challenges widespread and largely negative assumptions about Italian postmodernism and postmodernism in general. It considers contemporary Italian culture as a particularly interesting testing-ground for pluriform struggles of an ethical or political kind, struggles which build upon, whilst rejecting the essentialist assumptions behind, conventional notions of artistic commitment, or impegno. Drawing on a variety of cultural fields and artistic media from cinema to the literary genres of autobiography, romance and the giallo; from feminism to pensiero debole; from theatrical performance to shared practices of cultural memory the volume charts instances of ethical commitment and emancipatory social and political intervention in Italian culture within a post-ideological and post-hegemonic framework, siding with a more constructive and less apocalyptic analysis of the cultural climate of the past two decades in Italy. This balancing act is described by the contributors as postmodern impegno. The authors, artists and thinkers discussed in the essays include, among others, Eraldo Affinati, Adriana Cavarero, Marco Tullio Giordana, Carlo Lucarelli, Nanni Moretti, Marco Paolini, Roberto Saviano, Gianni Vattimo and Antonio Tabucchi. Questo libro mette in discussione la diffusa posizione critica che tende a svalutare lesperienza culturale della postmodernità e del postmodernismo in Italia. Il contesto italiano contemporaneo è di fatto un esempio quanto mai interessante e sintomatico per il definirsi di forme plurali e non monologiche di impegno politico-culturale, che pur rifiutando forme di assolutismo o essenzialismo epistemico o ideologico, mantengono fede a una consolidata tradizione di engagement artistico. Partendo dallanalisi di vari generi e strategie discorsive cinema, teatro, filosofia, letteratura di genere (romance, giallo, autobiografia) o di denuncia e di vari autori Eraldo Affinati, Adriana Cavarero, Marco Tullio Giordana, Carlo Lucarelli, Nanni Moretti, Marco Paolini, Roberto Saviano, Antonio Tabucchi, Gianni Vattimo, e altri questo volume raccoglie e analizza esempi di impegno etico e di intervento socio-politico allinterno di una prospettiva post-ideologica e post-egemonica, proponendo una visione più costruttiva e meno «apocalittica» del clima culturale generale degli ultimi ventanni in Italia.
ENGLISH

Waste And Discard In Italy And The Mediterranean - Theories, Practices, Literature And Film

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 This volume engages with the ambivalence embedded in and materialized by waste, its ambiguous ownership, and temporalities, interrogating popular and normative notions of waste and discard, and offering insight into forms of ecology built around waste â€" in particular with reference to the Italian and, more broadly, the Mediterranean area.
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The Enemies Of Nicolo Basti

by Lance Haward

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ENGLISH

The Distance To China - Twentieth-Century Italian Travel Narratives Of Patriotism, Commitment And Disillusion (1898â€“1985)

by Linetto Basilone

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 China was the destination of choice for hundreds of prominent Italian authors during the twentieth century, and their travel narratives helped to shape Italian representations of the country. This study sheds new light on how China was viewed in relation to Italian culture and how this influenced the Italian readership.
ENGLISH

Opera Aperta - Italian Electronic Literature From The 1960s To The Present

by Emanuela Patti

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 This book reconstructs the history of Italian electronic literature, looking at creative practices across literature, electronic and digital media from the early days of computers to the social media age. Topics include criticism of mass media, globalisation, information society and late capitalism as well as the enhancement of language itself.
ENGLISH

Reframing Migration - Lampedusa, Border Spectacle And The Aesthetics Of Subversion

by Federica Mazzara

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 This book reframes the debate around migration in the Mediterranean, and specifically around Lampedusa, by exploring how art forms â€" including works by Aida Silvestri, Bouchra Khalili, Isaac Julien, Maya Ramsay, Dagmawi Yimer and Broomberg & Chanarin â€" have become a platform for subverting the dominant narrative of migration.
ENGLISH

Italian Chimeras - Narrating Italy Through The Writing Of Sebastiano Vassalli

by Meriel Tulante

45,07€

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 Sebastiano Vassalli (1941â€"2015) engaged in an ambitious project to narrate Italy, the nation, its people and its pathologies. For Vassalli, chimeras are the myths that have repeatedly ensnared the nation, resulting in the social and political dysfunctions he denounces. This book represents the first study of Vassalliâ€™s works as a whole.
ENGLISH

Queer Ventennio - Italian Fascism, Homoerotic Art, And The Nonmodern In The Modern

by John Champagne

36,05€

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 Exploring the contribution of Italy to our understanding of both the history of homosexuality and European modernism, this ground-breaking study analyses three queer modernists - writer Giovanni Comisso, painter and writer Filippo de Pisis, and painter Corrado Cagli.
ENGLISH

Bruno Munari - The Lightness Of Art

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 Bruno Munari was one of the most important and eclectic twentieth-century European artists, pioneering what would later be labelled kinetic art. Through original archival research and illuminating comparisons with other artists and movements, both within and outside Italy, this volume offers a unique analysis of Munariâ€™s seven-decade-long career.
ENGLISH

Italian Industrial Literature And Film - Perspectives On The Representation Of Postwar Labor

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 This book explores the representation of industrial labor in Italian literature and film from the 1950s through the 1970s. Italian literature and film are shown to interpret â€" and influence â€" developments in labor during this period, from agriculture to industry to information technologies.
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