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Full Description
When America began to emerge as a world power at the end of the nineteenth century, Italy was a young nation, recently unified. The technological advances brought about by electricity and the combustion engine were vastly speeding up the capacity of news, ideas, and artefacts to travel internationally. Furthermore, improved literacy and social reforms had produced an Italian working class with increased time, money, and education. At the turn of the century, if Italy's ruling elite continued the tradition of viewing Paris as a model of sophistication and good taste, millions of lowly-educated Italians began to dream of America, and many bought a transatlantic ticket to migrate there.
By the 1920s, Italians were encountering America through Hollywood films and, thanks to illustrated magazines, they were mesmerised by the sight of Manhattan's futuristic skyline and by news of American lifestyle. The USA offered a model of modernity which flouted national borders and spoke to all. It could be snubbed, adored, or transformed for one's personal use, but it could not be ignored.
Perversely, Italy was by then in the hands of a totalitarian dictatorship, Mussolini's Fascism. What were the effects of the nationalistic policies and campaigns aimed at protecting Italians from this supposedly pernicious foreign influence? What did Mussolini think of America? Why were jazz, American literature, and comics so popular, even as the USA became Italy's political enemy? America in Italian Culture provides a scholarly and captivating narrative of this epochal shift in Italian culture.
Contents
Preface
Introduction
Part 1: The Discovery of America: 1861-1919
1: Cross-national Influence in Post-Unification Italy
2: The Idea of America in Italy's Two Nations
3: American Mass Production and the Dawn of Italian Mass Culture
4: American Letters: Literature, Opera Librettos, and Pragmatism
5: The Great War and the Arrival of Jazz
Part 2: America in Fascist Italy, 1922-1943
6: The USA as a Mirror of Modernity
7: The Craze for American Literature and Comics, and the Plight of the English Language
8: Dancing to Jazz on Fascist Airwaves
9: The Lure of Hollywood
10: American Culture in Fascism's Final Years (1938-1943)
Conclusion
