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National and cultural identity
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Italian Perspectives 21

Legenda: Oxford, 2011
£45.00 ($89.50 US)  Hardback  222pp
ISBN: 978-1-906540-74-6

The Unification of Italy in 1870 heralded a period of unprecedented change. While successive Liberal governments pursued imperial ventures and took Italy into World War One on the Allied side, on the domestic front technological advance, the creation of a national transport network, the expansion of state education, internal migration to cities and the rise of political associations all contributed to the rapid expansion of the print industry and the development of new and highly diversified reading publics.

Drawing on publishers’ archives, letters, diaries, and printed material, this book provide the most up-to-date research into the printed media — books, magazines and journals — in Italy between 1870 and 1914. With essays on publishers and reading communities, the professionalization of the role of journalist and writer, children’s literature, book illustrations, and printed media in colonial territories among others, this book is intended for those with interests in cultural production and consumption and questions of nation-formation and nationhood in and outside Italy.

Ann Hallamore Caesar is Professor of Italian at the University of Warwick. She has worked extensively on the literature of nineteenth and early twentieth Italy, most recently the co-authored Modern Italian Literature since 1690. A Cultural History (Polity Press: 2007) and she is currently working on the rise of the modern novel in eighteenth century Venice.

Gabriella Romani is Associate Professor of Italian at Seton Hall University. She is the co-editor of Writing to Delight: Nineteenth-Century Short Stories by Italian Women (U. of Toronto Press, 2007); and editor of Edith Bruck, Letter to My Mother (MLA Text and Translation Series, 2006) She is currently completing a book on Nineteenth-Century Postal Culture.

With the contributions:

Ann Hallamore Caesar, Gabriella Romani — Introduction
John Davis — Media, Markets and Modernity: The Italian Case, 1870–1915
Maria Grazia Lolla — Reader/Power: The Politics and Poetics of Reading in Post-Unification Italy
Joseph Luzzi — Verga Economicus: Language, Money, and Identity in I Malavoglia and Mastro-don Gesualdo
Olivia Santovetti — The Cliché of the Romantic Female Reader and the Paradox of Novelistic Illusion: Federico De Roberto’s L’Illusione (1891)
Francesca Billiani — Intellettuali militanti, funzionari e tecnologici, etica ed estetica in tre riviste fiorentine d’inizio secolo: Il Regno, La Voce, e Lacerba (1903–1914)
Luca Somigli — Towards a Literary Modernity all’italiana: A Note on F. T. Marinetti’s Poesia
Silvia Valisa — Casa editrice Sonzogno. Mediazione culturale, circuiti del sapere ed innovazione tecnologica nell’Italia unificata (1861–1900)
Matteo Salvadore — At the Borders of ‘Dark Africa’: Italian Expeditions to Ethiopia and the Bollettino della Società Geografica Italiana, 1867–1887
Ombretta Frau — L’editore delle signore: Licinio Cappelli e la narrativa femminile fra Otto e Novecento
Cristina Gragnani — Il lettore in copertina. Flirt rivista di splendore e declino (Primo tempo: 1897–1902)
Fiorenza Weinapple — Abbiamo fatto l’Italia. Adesso si tratta di fare gli Italiani. Il Programma di educazione nazionale del Secolo XX
Fabio Gadducci, Mirko Tavosanis — Printers, Poets, Publishers and Painters: The First Years of the Giornale per i bambini
John P. Welle — The Magic Lantern, the Illustrated Book, and the Beginnings of the Culture Industry: Intermediality in Carlo Collodi’s La lanterna magica di Giannettino