From a leading art historian, a provocative exploration of the intersection of art, politics, and history in 1960s ItalyFlashback, Eclipse is a groundbreaking study of 1960s Italian art and its troubled but also resourceful relation to the history and politics of the first part of the twentieth century and the aftermath of World War II. Most analyses have treated the 1960s in Italy as the decade of “presentism” par excellence, a political decade but one li...

Following Italy's unification in 1861, architects, artists, politicians, and literati engaged in volatile debates over the pursuit of national and regional identity. Growing industrialization and urbanization across the country contrasted with the rediscovery of traditionally built forms and objects created by the agrarian peasantry. Pride in Modesty argues that these ordinary, often anonymous, everyday things inspired and transformed Italian art and architecture from the 1920s th...

The end of the Second World War saw the emergence of neorealist film in Italy. In Italian Neorealist Cinema, Christopher Wagstaff analyses three neorealist films that have had significant influence on filmmakers around the world. Wagstaff treats these films as assemblies of sounds and images rather than as representations of historical reality. If Roberto Rossellini's Roma città aperta and Paisà, and Vittorio De Sica's Ladri di biciclette are still, half a centur...

Futurism began as an artistic and social movement in early twentieth-century Italy. Until now, much of the scholarship available in English has focused only on a single individual or art form. This volume seeks to present a more complete picture of the movement by exploring the history of the movement, the events leading up to the movement, and the lasting impact it has had as well as the individuals involved in it.The History of Futurism: The Precursors, Protagonists, and Legacies ...

Architecture and the Novel under the Italian Fascist Regime discusses the relationship between the novel and architecture during the Fascist period in Italy (1922-1943). By looking at two profoundly diverse aesthetic phenomena within the context of the creation of a Fascist State art, Billiani and Pennacchietti argue that an effort of construction, or reconstruction, was the main driving force behind both projects: the advocated “revolution” of the novel form (realism) and that of...

By taking as its point of departure the privileged relationship between the crime novel and its setting, this book is the most wide-ranging examination of the way in which Italian detective fiction in the last twenty years has become a means to articulate the changes in the social landscape of the country. Nowadays there is a general acknowledgment of the importance of place in Italian crime novels. However, apart from a limited scholarship on single cities, the genre has never been system...

Iberian Crime Fiction is the first volume in English to provide an extensive overview of crime fiction in Spain and Portugal. While the origins of peninsular crime fiction are traced in Nancy Vosburg's introductory chapter to the volume, the essays focus on specific topics that provide readers with a sense of the development of the genre in the second half of the 20th-century and current trends in the 21st-century. Patty Hart, whose The Spanish Sleuth introduced English-speaking readers to...

This book is the first monograph in English that comprehensively examines the ways in which Italian historical crime novels, TV series, and films have become a means to intervene in the social and political changes of the country. This study explores the ways in which fictional representations of the past mirror contemporaneous anxieties within Italian society in the work of writers such as Leonardo Sciascia, Andrea Camilleri, Carlo Lucarelli, Francesco Guccini, Loriano Macchiavelli, Marce...

This book comprehensively covers the history of Italian crime fiction from its origins to the present. Using the concept of "moral rebellion," the author examines the ways in which Italian crime fiction has articulated the country's social and political changes. The book concentrates on such writers as Augusto de Angelis (1888-1944), Giorgio Scerbanenco (1911-1969), Leonardo Sciascia (1921-1989), Andrea Camilleri (b. 1925), Loriano Macchiavelli (b. 1934), Massimo Carlotto (b. 1956), and Ma...

The history of Italian cinema includes, in addition to the renowned auteurs, a number of peculiar and lesser-known filmmakers.While their artistry was often plagued with production setbacks, their works--influenced by poetry, playwriting, advertising, literature, comics and a nonconformist, sometimes antagonistic attitude--were original and thought provoking.Drawing from official papers and original scripts, this book includes much previously unpublished information on the ...

Fascism, Architecture, and the Claiming of Modern Milan, 1922*–1943* chronicles the dramatic architectural and urban transformation of Milan during the nearly twenty years of fascist rule. The commercial and financial centre of Italy and the birthplace of fascism, Milan played a central role in constructing fascism’s national image and identity as it advanced from a revolutionary movement to an established state power.Using a wide range of archival sources, Lucy M. Maulsby...

Marco Bellocchio is one of Italy's most important and prolific directors, with a career spanning five decades. In this book, Clodagh J. Brook explores the boundaries between the public and the private, the political and the personal, and the collective and the individual as they appear in Bellocchio's films. Including work on psychoanalysis, politics, film production, autobiography, and the relationship between film tradition and contemporary culture, Marco Bellocchio touches on f...