The cult of the Duce is the first book to explore systematically the personality cult of Benito Mussolini. It examines practices that began before Mussolini's rise to power and which multiplied as Fascism consolidated its support among the Italian population. By approaching the subject from many different angles, including those of the visual arts and the media as well as social and political history, this book makes a decisive contribution to the understanding of Fascism and modern leadership. The conviction that Mussolini was an exceptional individual first became dogma among Fascists and then was communicated to the people at large. Intellectuals and artists helped fashion the idea of the Duce as a new Caesar while the modern media of press, photography, cinema and radio aggrandised his every public act. Mussolini's image was ubiquitous and varied; he adopted the guises of bourgeois politician, man of culture, sportsman, family man and warrior as he appealed to different audiences. The book explores in detail many manifestations of the cult and the way in which Italians experienced it. It also considers its controversial resonances in the postwar period. The founder of Fascism was the prototype dictator of the twentieth century. As such his cult is a crucial topic in the study of a century that produced many examples of dictators, some of them explicitly modelling themselves on Mussolini. Academics and students with interests in Italian and European history and politics will find the volume indispensable to an understanding of the modern era. Among the contributions is an Afterword by Mussolini's leading biographer, R.J.B. Bosworth.

The present volume is the first study in the English language to focus specifically on Italian crime fiction, weaving together a historical perspective and a thematic approach, with a particular focus on the representation of space, especially city space, gender, and the tradition of impegno, the social and political engagement which characterised the Italian cultural and literary scene in the postwar period. The 8 chapters in this volume explore the distinctive features of the Italian tradition from the 1930s to the present, by focusing on a wide range of detective and crime novels by selected Italian writers, some of whom have an established international reputation, such as C. E. Gadda, L. Sciascia and U. Eco, whilst others may be relatively unknown, such as the new generation of crime writers of the Bologna school and Italian women crime writers. Each chapter examines a specific period, movement or group of writers, as well as engaging with broader debates over the contribution crime fiction makes more generally to contemporary Italian and European culture. The editor and contributors of this volume argue strongly in favour of reinstating crime fiction within the canon of Italian modern literature by presenting this once marginalised literary genre as a body of works which, when viewed without the artificial distinction between high and popular literature, shows a remarkable insight into Italy's postwar history, tracking its societal and political troubles and changes as well as often also engaging with metaphorical and philosophical notions of right or wrong, evil, redemption, and the search of the self.