Officina: Experiments in Engagements in the Arts

This article is primarily concerned with interconnections between forms of impegno (political engagement) and aesthetic choices, as they were articulated in the literary and cultural journal Officina. In order to reassess the role of Officina within the Italian cultural and political debate of the day, this article considers two main narratives unfolding in the journal: the aesthetic rejection of Novecentismo, understood as the epitome of artistic autonomy, and the articulation of a form of Marxist impegno suitable for a neo-capitalist society and stemming from the class-based idea of the organic intellectual. Using published and unpublished correspondence, we argue that Officina had a pivotal role in producing a theoretical framework for the conceptualisation of a post-neorealist idea of Marxist critical analysis as well as of intellectual, aesthetic and political engagement.</jats:p

Mediating culture in the Italian literary field, 1940s-1950s: an introduction

This introduction lays out the scholarly and methodological context where to situate the contributions to this special issue. By combining a rigorous scrutiny of hitherto untapped archival sources with a re-examined application of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of culture within the field of periodical studies and publishing history in Italy (1940s-1950s), the studies illuminate the complex ways in which journals, periodical editors, and the connected publishing houses negotiate cultural practice in a literary field increasingly dominated by the polarization of political discourse

'Baroquemania: a counter-rationalist history of Italian art'. Review of: Laura Moure Cecchini, Baroquemania: Italian Visual Culture and The Construction of National Identity, 1898-1954, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021, 288 pp., 93 col. Plates, £ 80, ISBN 9781526153173.

This review discussed the emergence of the Baroque in Italian visual arts as analysed in the book Baroquemania by Laura Moure Cecchini. In this book, the author shows how the baroque is a key element of the history of post-unification Italy which has been often neglected by the relevant scholarship on the matter. By reinscribing the Baroque within the Italian national paradigm, the book contributes to rewrite an important chapter of the history of Italian art in order to question its own foundational premises of an entirely rational strive to become a modern nation-state. In this way, Baroquemania represent an important addition to the existing scholarship on the relationship between the arts and the construction of national identity

Il testo fantasticizzato e goticizzato come metafora della destrutturazione del discorso ‘nazione’: attorno agli scrittori scapigliati

Beginning in the late 1870s in Italy, new narrative forms, mixing elements borrowed from the Gothic and fantastic genres and modes with those from historical realism, started to enjoy much greater success and to find more followers and practitioners. More specifically, at the margins of an already existing hypothetical historical-realist narrative block, heterodoxical narrative expressions were coming into being. These were often populated by   physically dismembered and psychologically multi-faced ‘in-between’ characters, who were traditionally depicted through  Northern European forms of the Gothic and fantastic, until  the leading members of the first  Italian avant-garde movement, the Milanese Scapigliatura,  transplanted their interpreations of the story of Italian national unification into their short stories and novels.In the texts analyzed, the use of the typically Gothic and fantastic motifs of the uninhabited house (or habited by ghosts) and the feminine body, both in its phenomenology of the mother, nurse and spouse, and in that of the faithless, fallen and sick woman, function as metaphors to portray the shape of the national body. By looking at the representations of the house, the female body and marriage, this article  demonstrates how the heroines of the post-unification novels Fosca (1869) by Iginio Ugo Tarchetti and Senso (1883) by Camillo Boito understand and construct their corporeality as the epistemological locus where the ethical ambivalence towards the disappointing outcomes of  national unification could be expressed. Therefore, the Gothic with its instances of social subversion embodied in the heroines in the castle, and the fantastic with its ontology of ‘hesitation’ and of the fragmented and divided body could offer the ideal narrative solution for portraying the failure of Italy’s palingenetic re-birth during the Risorgimento

Introduction: rupture and continuity in the Italian literary field 1926-1960

Introduction to the Special Issu