Against Redemption: Democracy, Memory, and Literature in Post-Fascist Italy

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 320 pages
Publication date: 06 December 2022
Publisher: Fordham University Press

WINNER,HELEN AND HOWARD R. MARRARO PRIZE IN ITALIAN HISTORY Unveiling the wealth of ideas and shedding light on the contentious transition from fascism to democracy, this book examines authors, works, and memories that were subsequently silenced by Cold War politics. The most contentious issue in modern Italy today is how a shared memory of Fascism and its cultural heritage came to be, transcending the boundaries between academic and public discourse. Against Redemption focuses on the historical period when disagreement reached its peak: the transition between Mussolini's downfall in July 1943 and the Christian Democrats' victory over the Left in the 1948 general elections. By dispelling the silence surrounding the range of opinions in the years before the ideological struggle solidified into Cold War oppositions, this book highlights early postwar literary practices as the primary means of intellectual dissent, shedding new light on the role of cultural policies in institutionalizing collective memory. During Italy's transition to democracy, competing narratives about the recent traumatic past emerged and solidified, portraying the country's break with Mussolini's regime as a political and personal redemption from its politics of exclusion and unrestrained use of violence. Conversely, prominent authors such as Elsa Morante, Carlo Levi, Alberto Moravia, and Curzio Malaparte, in close dialogue with remarkable but now-neglected figures, emphasized the cultural continuity between the new democracy and Fascism, igniting heated debates from opposite political standpoints. Their works addressed questions such as the processing of national defeat, Italian responsibility in World War II, and the Holocaust, revealing how the social, racial, and economic dimensions of the past shaped contemporary Italy.

Weight: 486g
Dimension: 151 x 229 x 23 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781531502393