A Woman’s Loss of Imagination: Paola Masino’s Magical Realism in Nascita e morte della Massaia

Criticism on Paola Masino has flourished since the early 2000s. This increased attention has contributed towards reclaiming an author often overshadowed by the attention received by her partner, Massimo Bontempelli, the father of realismo magico. Masino experimented with a variety of styles—realismo magico was one of them—as she rejected strictly naturalistic forms of representation, preferring to co-opt myths and the supernatural. Nascita e morte della Massaia (1945) is Masino’s most renowned literary effort, both for its critique of Fascist Italy and for its sophisticated stylistic effects. Nascita, while indebted to Bontempelli’s theorizations, features all the chief characteristics listed in Faris’s analysis of magical realism as an international phenomenon, and illustrates how magical realism offers strategies for evading censorship to those writing against totalitarianism regimes. At the same time, it is an example of how magical realism can be used to denounce socially imposed gender roles. My analysis shows how this narrative mode emerges on multiple levels within Masino’s text

De la censure politique à l’autocensure historique: le cas de la littérature italienne sous le fascisme

Quel est le point commun entre les printemps arabes, l'affaire Wikileaks, la surveillance du Net par les autorités chinoises et les ennuis subis par Mediapart lorsqu'il publie des documents du dossier Bettencourt ? La censure

De la censure politique à l’autocensure historique : le cas de la littérature italienne sous le fascisme

Cet article vise à comprendre le développement de la censure dans l’Italie fasciste et, plus spécifiquement, le relation entretenue par Benito Mussolini avec les livres et leur censure. Cette relation nous offre un aperçu sur la façon d’opérer du dictateur qui se révèle utile pour saisir plus généralement comment agissait Mussolini comme politicien, intellectuel et décideur politique.This article aims to give a sense of the development of censorship in Fascist Italy, and more specifically, a sense of Benito Mussolini’s relationship with books and their censorship. The latter can provide us with an insight into the man’s modus operandi which can be useful for a more general understanding of how Mussolini’s mind worked as a politician, as an intellectual and a policy-maker

Fascist censorship on literature and the case of Elio Vittorini

This article tackles the issue of literary censorship in Fascist Italy. The first part offers an outline of the organization and the practices with which the regime attempted to control publishers and authors. It tracks the development of Mussolini's Press Office into a fully fledged ministry, examines the introduction of a semi-preventive form of censorship, and looks at the effects of the anti-Semitic laws. The second part concentrates on the literary activities of the novelist, editor and translator, Elio Vittorini. His many encounters with Fascist censorship provide ideal subject matter for a close examination of how censorship affected literary production. It also provides an example of the need to re-address aspects of Italy's literary history during the Fascist period, particularly in relation to questions of coercive and consensual collaboration with the regime

A different mimesis: the fantastic in Italy from the Scapigliati to the postmodern

This thesis investigates the literary fantastic in Italy from the late nineteenth century to the second half of the twentieth century. The purpose is to analyse the way in which the fantastic functions in a story—its ʻmechanicsʼ—and to see how the fantastic evolved structurally over the first century of its existence in Italy. This investigation is carried out by the development of a new theoretical methodology together with the close reading of a selection of texts from four key Italian authors of fantastic literature. The thesis is divided into six chapters. The first chapter is a historical overview of the emergence of the fantastic in Italy in the late nineteenth century up to the second half of the twentieth century; it examines the obstacles the fantastic has faced and some of the thematic and structural characteristics of texts which emerge. The second chapter is a literature review of the theoretical models used to analyse and understand the fantastic, followed by an outline of a new model, entitled Different Mimetics, which looks at the internal logic of the fantastic. In the following four chapters Different Mimetics is applied to the study of a selection of fantastic texts by four authors. Chapter three focuses on Ugo Tarchetti, and shows that his stories are defined by coexistence and coincidence in both historical and thematic terms. Chapter four demonstrates how Giovanni Papini reverses the mechanics one might expect, and how his stories are structured as internal narratives. Chapter five looks at how Dino Buzzatiʼs stories are characterised by instability and stretched narrative paradigms; and finally, chapter six looks at how Italo Calvinoʼs narratives focus on world creation and paradox and how they question the stability of narrative paradigms.This thesis is not currently available in ORA

Culture and intellectuals

The full-text of this book chapter is not available in ORA. Citation: Bonsaver, G. (2009). Culture and intellectuals. In: Bosworth, R. J. B. (ed.) The Oxford handbook of fascism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 109-126