Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922-1945 Paperback - 2004

Six months before taking power, Mussolini asked readers of his new review Gerarchia, Does fascism aim at restoring the State, or subverting it?

"Ruth Ben-Ghiat's Fascist Modernities: Italy 1922-1945 is among the very best analyses of Fascist culture in any language. Based on a truly amazing amount of research, this volume traces the first stirrings of a generation of Italian writers and film directors who would pass from Fascism through the Resistance to militancy in the Communist, Socialist, Action, and Christian Democratic parties and then beyond into the new Italy of the 'economic miracle.'"--Alexander De Grand, author of Bottai e la cultura fascista

"A superb and original work of scholarship, Fascist Modernities give us a startling new picture of the Italian fascist period and its cultural politics, as well as remarkable new analyses of Italian fascist anti-Semitism and of the relation between Italy's colonial aspirations and conquests and its modernizing schemes. Most impressive of all, Ben-Ghiat single-handedly changes our understanding of the place of realism in Italian literary history and in twentieth-century cinema."--Barbara Spackman, author of Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology and Social Fantasy in Italy

"Ruth Ben-Ghiat's book is an important contribution to the history of fascist culture, showing the complex ways in which fascism used intellectuals and intellectuals used fascism."--Alexander Stille, author of Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian-Jewish Families Under Fascism