Antonio Gramsci's The Southern Question remains as provocative today as it was when it was written. During ten years of political imprisonment under Mussolini's Fascist government, Gramsci produced The Prison Notebooks, a continued meditation on subjects and relationships first proposed within the pages of this essay. The purpose in re-introducing the essay is to emphasize how Gramsci's analysis of social stratification of Northern and Southern Italy in 1926 is relevant to current discussions about state formation, diasporas, and strategic alliances.

Working toward an analysis of the influence of photography on the construction of an Italian "type" to serve the mandates of the new nation in the 1860s, this book engages the work of writers and photographers who have addressed or participated in this venture. From Giovanni Verga and Italo Calvino's writings to the conceptual visual philosophy of Tommaso Campanella and Luigi Ghirri's photography. From the Arcadic gaze of Baron von Gloeden to Tina Modotti's revolutionary vision, the works analyzed in this book have all contributed in shaping our contemporary visual vocabulary. And, while Italy is at the center of my considerations, the ideas that populate this work are in many ways globally applicable and relevant. Looters, Photographers, and Thieves seeks to contribute to the fascinating discourse on the photographic image and its specific uses in the representation of racial, ethnic and gender difference, and suggest how the isolation of images according to the dictates of power relations might influence and condition ways of seeing. Finally, this book is meant as a locus where the images produced in the shaping of notions of citizenship and cultural relevance in nineteenth and twentieth century Italy might reveal the processes of the imaginary. As such, the arguments and images in each chapter thread through each other to propose ways by which to approach disparate subjects and forms in order to envision photographers themselves as seers rather than gazers.

The essays in this volume provide a theorization of what we might call the "denatured" wild, in other words a notion of environmental "restoration" or "reinhabitation" that recognizes and reconfigures the human factor as an interdependent entity. Acknowledging the contributions of Marco Armerio, Serenella Iovino, Giovanna Ricoveri, Patrick Barron and Anna Re among others, Ecocritical Approaches to Italian Culture and Literature: The Denatured Wild negotiates the ground within the historicizing, theoretical perspectives, and surveying spirit of these writers. Despite the central role that nature has played in Italian culture and literature, there has been an evident lack of critical approaches free of the bridles of the socio-political manipulations of nationalism. The authors in this collection, by recognizing the groundbreaking work of many non-Italian ecocritics, challenge the narrowly defined conventions of Italian Studies and illuminates the complexities of an Italian ecocriticism that reveals a rich environmentally engaged literary and cultural tradition.

This volume explores the Italian contribution to the current global phenomenon of a "return to reality" by examining the country's rich cultural production in literature and cinema. The focus is particularly on works from the period spanning the Nineties to the present day which offer alternatives to notions of reality as manufactured by the collusion between the neo-liberal state and the media. The book also discusses Italy's relationship with its own cultural past by investigating how Italian authors deal with the return of the specter of Neorealism as it haunts the modern artistic imagination in this new epoch of crisis. Furthermore, the volume engages in dialogue with previous works of criticism on contemporary Italian realism, while going beyond them in devoting equal attention to cinema and literature. The resulting interactions will aid the reader in understanding how the critical arts respond to the triumph of hyperrealism in the current era of the virtual spectacle as they seek new ways to promote cognitive transformations and foster ethical interventions.