Editorial Reviews
Book Description
This richly textured cultural history of Italian fascism traces the narrative path that accompanied the making of the regime and the construction of Mussolini's power. Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi reads fascist myths, rituals, images, and speeches as texts that tell the story of fascism. Linking Mussolini's elaboration of a new ruling style to the shaping of the regime's identity, she finds that in searching for symbolic means and forms that would represent its political novelty, fascism in fact brought itself into being, creating its own power and history.
Falasca-Zamponi argues that an aesthetically founded notion of politics guided fascist power's historical unfolding and determined the fascist regime's violent understanding of social relations, its desensitized and dehumanized claims to creation, its privileging of form over ethical norms, and ultimately its truly totalitarian nature.
Card catalog description
At the end of October 1922, in a whirlwind of events and unexpected circumstances, Benito Mussolini became prime minister of Italy. For the next twenty years, he dominated Italy as a cult hero and the duce of fascism and, later, founder of the empire. This richly textured cultural history traces the narrative path that accompanied the making of the fascist regime and the construction of Mussolini's power. Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi reads fascist myths, rituals, images, and speeches as texts that tell the story of fascism. Linking Mussolini's elaboration of a new style of rule to the shaping of the regime's identity, she finds that in searching for symbolic means and forms to represent its political novelty, fascism actually created its own power, its own happening, its history.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini's Italy (Studies on the History of Society and Culture)
Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini's Italy (Studies on the History of Society and Culture),Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi,University of California Press,0520226771,Europe - Italy,History - General History,History: World,Modern - 20th Century,Social Science,Sociology - General,History / General
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