With the "Tangentopoli" corruption scandals of the early 1990s, Italy is purported recently to have experienced a period of political change comparable to the period immediately following World War II. This latter being the socio-political environment in which the concept of "impegno" - political commitment - in literature became current, this work asks whether an equivalent moment of constitutional crisis in the 1990s has had a comparable impact on perceptions of the role of the writer and of literature in Italian society. This volume traces the development of "impegno" (political commitment) in post-war Italian prose literature using the metaphor of fragmentation: the monolithic notion of commitment to an overarching political agenda has splintered, facilitating a fragmentary attention to specific issues.Part One examines the early "impegno" debate through the critical works of Vittorini, Calvino and Pasolini, tracing it forward into the 1960s and 1970s. The remaining three parts study in detail the "fragments of impegno" offered by contemporary authors - Tabucchi, Ramondino, De Carlo, Tondelli, Ballestra, and African immigrant writers, including Fazel, Melliti and Methnani. This range of authors and texts illustrates the ways in which socio-political issues are explicitly or implicitly addressed, represented, or embedded in contemporary Italian literature.

This book addresses a rich corpus of contemporary narratives by authors who have come to Italy as migrants. It traces the figurative commonalities that emerge across these diverse texts, which together suggest the shape and substance of what might be termed 'migrant imaginaries'. Examining five central figures and concepts - identity, memory, home, place and space, and literature - across a range of novels and stories by writers of African and Middle Eastern origin, the study elucidates the affective and expressive processes that inflect migrant story-telling. Drawing on the work of cultural theorists such as Sara Ahmed and Michel de Certeau, as well as on recent work in postcolonial literary studies, memory studies, human geography and feminist theory, the book probes the varied works of Shirin Ramzanali Fazel, Amara Lakhous, Mohsen Melliti, Younis Tawfik and many others. Each chapter posits alternative interpretations of the ways in which the interior experience of encounters across territories, cultures and languages is figured in this literature. In doing so, the book moves towards a wider apprehension of recent Italian migration narratives as suggestions of what a new notion of contemporary 'Italian' literature might look like, figured at once within and beyond the boundaries of a national literature, a national language and a national cultural imaginary.

Worshipped by her fans, denounced by her enemies, and forever shadowed by controversy and scandal, the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand was a powerful thinker whose views on government and markets shaped the conservative movement from its earliest days. Drawing on unprecedented access to Rand's private papers and the original, unedited versions of Rand's journals, Jennifer Burns offers a groundbreaking reassessment of this key cultural figure, examining her life, her ideas, and her impact on conservative political thought.
Goddess of the Market follows Rand from her childhood in Russia through her meteoric rise from struggling Hollywood screenwriter to bestselling novelist, including the writing of her wildly successful The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Burns highlights the two facets of Rand's work that make her a perennial draw for those on the right: her promotion of capitalism, and her defense of limited government. Both sprang from her early, bitter experience of life under Communism, and became among the most deeply enduring of her messages, attracting a diverse audience of college students and intellectuals, business people and Republican Party activists, libertarians and conservatives. The book also traces the development of Rand's Objectivist philosophy and her relationship with Nathaniel Branden, her closest intellectual partner, with whom she had an explosive falling out in 1968.
One of the Denver Post's Great Reads of 2009
One of Bloomberg News's Top Nonfiction Books of 2009
"Excellent."
--Time magazine
"A terrific book--a serious consideration of Rand's ideas, and her role in the conservative movement of the past three quarters of a century."
--The American Thinker
"A wonderful book: beautifully written, completely balanced, extensively researched. The match between author and subject is so perfect that one might believe that the author was chosen by the gods to write this book. She has sympathy and affection for her subject but treats her as a human being, with no attempt to cover up the foibles."
--Mises Economics Blog

Contemporary Italian Diversity in Critical and Fictional Narratives is about identity-individual and national-and belonging. Also, it is an affirmation of diversity. Its editors have brought together articles by scholars analyzing the literature of migration and creative pieces by recognized authors who have lived experience of migration. English-speaking readers will find their own societies' struggles with diversity mirrored in Italy's colonial inheritance, its renewed nationalism, populism, xenophobia, shifting national identity, and other phenomena which are the contexts for the writings in this volume. The artists and scholars presented and discussed in this volume often challenge national discourses and dehumanizations, issues of race and of gender. But many also seek to move beyond the negative and critical to claim belonging-especially national belonging-in the name of difference as part of human experience. The selections emphasize how individuals both reflect and enact societal change, and foreground the inescapable fact that diversity and migration drive and shape societal identity in our current world.

An Open Access edition of this book will be available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. In a world increasingly defined by the transnational and translingual, and by the pressures of globalization, it has become difficult to study culture as primarily a national phenomenon. A Handbook offers students across Modern Languages an introduction to the kind of methodological questions they need to look at culture transnationally. Each of the short essays takes a key concept in cultural study and suggests how it might be used to explore and illuminate some aspect of identity, mobility, translation, and cultural exchange across borders. The authors range over different language areas and their wide chronological reach provides broad coverage, as well as a flexible and practical methodology for studying cultures in a transnational framework. The essays show that an inclusive, transnational vision and practice of Modern Languages is central to understanding human interaction in an inclusive, globalized society. A Handbook stands as an effective and necessary theoretical and thematically diverse glossary and companion to the 'national' volumes in the series.

The late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries witness significant advancement in the production and, crucially, the consumption of culture in Italy. During the long process towards and beyond Italy becoming a nation-state in 1861, new modes of writing and performing - the novel, the self-help manual, theatrical improvisation - develop in response to new practices and technologies of production and distribution. Key to the emergence of an inclusive national audience in Italy is, however, the audience itself. A wide and varied body of consumers of culture, animated by the notion of an Italian national cultural identity, create in this period an increasingly complex demand for different cultural products. This body is energized by the wider access to education and to the Italian language brought about by educational reforms, by growing urbanization, by enhanced social mobility, and by transcultural connections across European borders. This book investigates this process, analyzing the ways in which authors, composers, publishers, performers, journalists, and editors engage with the anxieties and aspirations of their diverse audiences. Fourteen essays by specialists in the field, exploring individual contexts and cases, demonstrate how interests related to gender, social class, cultural background and practices of reading and spectatorship, exert determining influence upon the production of culture in this period. They describe how women, men, and children from across the social and regional strata of the emerging nation contribute incrementally but actively to the idea and the growing reality of an Italian national cultural life. They show that from newspapers to salon performances, from letters to treatises in social science, from popular novels to literary criticism, from philosophical discussions to opera theaters, there is evidence in Italy in this period of unprecedented participation, crossing academic and popular cultures, in the formation of a national audience in Italy. This cultural transformation later produces the mass culture in Italy which underpins the major movements of the twentieth century and which undergoes new challenges and reformulations in the Italy we know today.

Worshipped by her fans, denounced by her enemies, and forever shadowed by controversy and scandal, the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand was a powerful thinker whose views on government and markets shaped the conservative movement from its earliest days. Drawing on unprecedented access to Rand's private papers and the original, unedited versions of Rand's journals, Jennifer Burns offers a groundbreaking reassessment of this key cultural figure, examining her life, her ideas, and her impact on conservative political thought.
Goddess of the Market follows Rand from her childhood in Russia through her meteoric rise from struggling Hollywood screenwriter to bestselling novelist, including the writing of her wildly successful The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Burns highlights the two facets of Rand's work that make her a perennial draw for those on the right: her promotion of capitalism, and her defense of limited government. Both sprang from her early, bitter experience of life under Communism, and became among the most deeply enduring of her messages, attracting a diverse audience of college students and intellectuals, business people and Republican Party activists, libertarians and conservatives. The book also traces the development of Rand's Objectivist philosophy and her relationship with Nathaniel Branden, her closest intellectual partner, with whom she had an explosive falling out in 1968.
One of the Denver Post's Great Reads of 2009
One of Bloomberg News's Top Nonfiction Books of 2009
"Excellent."
--Time magazine
"A terrific book--a serious consideration of Rand's ideas, and her role in the conservative movement of the past three quarters of a century."
--The American Thinker
"A wonderful book: beautifully written, completely balanced, extensively researched. The match between author and subject is so perfect that one might believe that the author was chosen by the gods to write this book. She has sympathy and affection for her subject but treats her as a human being, with no attempt to cover up the foibles."
--Mises Economics Blog