Rivel-Azione: Poetry and Politics in Modern Italy

The book explores the intimate connection between poetry and politics in modernity and, in particular, in liberal and fascist Italy. Through a historical and interdisciplinary approach, the essays focus on various fundamental passages of liberal system crisis: political poetry as an act of rebellion against the social and economic system; as a tool of disintegration of bourgeois morality and civilization; as a pillar of the building and consolidation of the fascist regime; as a central instrument of the myth of the 'new man'. What emerges is a mosaic capable of enlightening the values and disvalues and the transformation of Italian radical and nationalist mindset, through the elimination of the boundaries between ‘matter’ and ‘spirit’ and between different disciplines: as in the liberal period, political poetry deals with new issues such as Time, Space, and the Body, so in the totalitarian Fascist culture integrates and contaminates other aesthetic forms: theatre, dance, architecture