Francesca Billiani

Italia, 1903-1943

Culture nazionali e narrazioni straniere

Modes of Censorship and Translation articulates a variety of scholarly and disciplinary perspectives and offers the reader access to the widening cultural debate on translation and censorship, including cross-national forms of cultural fertilization. It is a study of censorship and its patterns of operation across a range of disciplinary settings, from media to cultural and literary studies, engaging with often neglected genres and media such as radio, cinema and theatre. Adopting an interdisciplinary and transnational approach and bringing together contributions based on primary research which often draws on unpublished archival material, the volume analyzes the multi-faceted relationship between censorship and translation in different national contexts, including Italy, Spain, Great Britain, Greece, Nazi Germany and the GDR, focusing on the political, ideological and aesthetic implications of censorship, as well as the hermeneutic play fostered by any translational act. By offering innovative methodological interpretations and stimulating case studies, it proposes new readings of the operational modes of both censorship and translation. The essays gathered here challenge current notions of the accessibility of culture, whether in overtly ideological and politically repressive contexts, or in seemingly 'neutral' cultural scenarios.

National Contexts and Diverse Media

Modes of Censorship

Between 1917 to 1975 Germany, Italy, Portugal, the Soviet Union, and Spain shifted from liberal parliamentary democracies to authoritarian and totalitarian dictatorships, seeking total control, mass consensus, and the constitution of a 'new man/woman' as the foundation of a modern collective social identity. As they did so these regimes uniformly adopted what we would call a modernist aesthetic – huge-scale experiments in modernism were funded and supported by fascist and totalitarian dictators. Famous examples include Mussolini's New Rome at EUR, or the Stalinist apartment blocks built in urban Russia. Focusing largely on Mussolini's Italy, Francesca Billiani argues that modernity was intertwined irrecoverably with fascism – that too often modernist buildings, art and writings are seen as a purely cultural output, when in fact the principles of modernist aesthetics constitute and are constituted by the principles of fascism. The obsession with the creation of the 'new man' in art and in reality shows this synergy at work. This book is a key contribution to the field of twentieth century history – particularly in the study of fascism, while also appealing to students of art history and philosophy.

Arts and Regimes

Fascist Modernism in Italy

Laura Pennacchietti

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license "Francesca Billiani and Laura Pennacchietti draw brilliantly and with precision the evolution of the new architecture and of the national novel (with insights on translations of international novels), whose profiles had been shaped from different angles, especially in the 1930s. These two fields, apparently so distant one from the other, had never been analysed in parallel. This book does this and uncovers several points of contact between the two, spanning propaganda and theoretical turning points." —Chiara Costa and Cornelia Mattiacci, Fondazione Prada, Italy "This book shows convincingly how the arte di Stato during Fascism was created with the morality of a new novel as well as architecture. It is surprising to read how one of the representatives of State art, Giuseppe Bottai, is also one of the finest critics of realist novels and rationalist architecture. More than parallel endeavours, the system of the arts during the Fascist regime should be viewed as a series of intersections of cultural, political and aesthetic discourses." —Monica Jansen, Utrecht University, The Netherlands Architecture and the Novel under the Italian Fascist Regime discusses the relationship between the novel and architecture during the Fascist period in Italy (1922-1943). By looking at two profoundly diverse aesthetic phenomena within the context of the creation of a Fascist State art, Billiani and Pennacchietti argue that an effort of construction, or reconstruction, was the main driving force behind both projects: the advocated "revolution" of the novel form (realism) and that of architecture (rationalism). The book is divided into seven chapters, which in turn analyze the interconnections between the novel and architecture in theory and in practice. The first six chapters cover debates on State art, on the novel and on architecture, as well as their historical development and their unfolding in key journals of the per iod. The last chapter offers a detailed analysis of some important novels and buildings, which have in practice realized some of the key principles articulated in the theoretical disputes. Francesca Billiani is Senior Lecturer in Italian Studies and Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts and Languages at the University of Manchester, UK. Laura Pennacchietti is Research Associate in Italian Studies at the University of Manchester, UK.

Architecture and the Novel Under the Italian Fascist Regime

National Cultures and Foreign Narratives in Italy, 1903–1943

Gigliola Sulis

Meanwhile, by assimilating the Other into our own modes of representation of reality and imagination, twentieth-century female writers of the fantastic show how alternative identities can be shaped and social constituencies can be challenged."--BOOK JACKET.

Francesca Billiani

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