COM 313: Intercultural Communication: Electronic Books on Italian Culture

In this work, Peter Burke presents a social and cultural history of the Italian Renaissance. He discusses the social and political institutions which existed in Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and analyses the ways of thinking and seeing which characterized this period of extraordinary artistic creativity. Developing a distinctive sociological approach, Peter Burke is concerned with not only the finished works of Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci and others, but also with the social background, patterns of recruitment and means of subsistence of this 'cultural elite'. New to this edition is a fully revised introduction focusing on what Burke terms 'the domestic turn' in Renaissance studies and discussing the relation of the Renaissance to global trends.

The vexed relationship between the two parts of Italy, often referred to as the Southern Question, has shaped that nation's political, social, and cultural life throughout the twentieth century. But how did southern Italy become the south, a place and people seen as different from and inferior to the rest of the nation? Writing at the rich juncture of literature, history, and cultural theory, Nelson Moe explores how Italy's Mezzogiorno became both backward and picturesque, an alternately troubling and fascinating borderland between Europe and its others.

The Holocaust in Italian Culture, 1944-2010 is the first major study of how postwar Italy confronted, or failed to confront, the Holocaust. Fascist Italy was the model for Nazi Germany, and Mussolini was Hitler's prime ally in the Second World War. But Italy also became a theater of war and a victim of Nazi persecution after 1943, as resistance, collaboration, and civil war raged. Many thousands of Italians-Jews and others-were deported to concentration camps throughout Europe. After the war, Italian culture produced a vast array of stories, images, and debate through which it came to terms with the Holocaust's difficult legacy. Gordon probes a rich range of cultural material as he paints a picture of this shared encounter with the darkest moment of twentieth-century history. His book explores aspects of Italian national identity and memory, offering a new model for analyzing the interactions between national and international images of the Holocaust.

With its monsters, vampires and cowboys, Italian popular culture in the postwar period has generally been dismissed as a form of evasion or escapism. Here, four international scholars re-examine and reinterpret the era to show that popular Italian cinema was not only in tune with contemporary political and social trends, it also presaged the turmoil and rebellion of the 1960s and 1970s._x000D__x000D_Through a perceptive analysis of the cultural and political atmosphere of the times, we come to see how the changes wrought by modernization, urbanization, the rise of consumerism and the sexual revolution were reflected in popular cinema. The 'sword and sandal' film, based on Greco-Roman mythology and starring body-builders, was linked to the increasing conservatism and growing politicization of Italian film and society. Anxieties unleashed by the sexual revolution found expression in horror films and in the spaghetti western, particularly in violence against women, as a result of growing male anxiety towards female emancipation and a crisis in the prevailing patriarchal order. Comedy Italian-style re-worked the impact of the economic boom and a consumerist lifestyle, as a new middle-class recognized itself at the cinema._x000D__x000D_Together, this array of cinematic visions conveyed a plurality of messages that ranged from the more conservative and pro-establishment to the more rebellious and pro-revolutionary, at the same time that they responded to the emotional needs of an emerging mass audience and offered ways of binding together an increasingly distressed social order.