By Katrin Frisch

Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Wyndham Lewis have all, to varying degrees, been the subject of studies that explore their ideology. All too often, however, these studies have not tackled the issue adequately, limiting their analytical approach to fascism or other phenomena such as anti-Semitism. Frequently, they have also sought to exculpate these writers or to normalise their political tendencies in an effort to circumnavigate the dilemma of how to address the paradox of right-wing artists who are both harbingers and opponents of the imagined trajectory of progressive modernity. This interdisciplinary study analyses the connections between literary Modernism and right-wing ideology. Moreover, it is the first academic study to explore the reception of these Modernist authors by today's far right, seeking to understand in what ways they use strategic readings of Modernist texts to legitimise right-wing ideology. By raising fundamental questions about the relationship between aesthetics and politics, this study ultimately challenges its readers to see their cultural practices as political. It wants to make visible and problematize the interdependencies of right-wing ideology and cultural production as well as reception in order to explain the (far) Right as a phenomenon deeply rooted in European history and cultural development. It thus lays bare the misconceptions, the gaps as well as the complicity in the debate about right-wing ideology in literature.

Berlin: Logos Verlag Berlin GmbH , 2019. 378p.

USED BOOK. MAY CONTAIN MARK-UP

By Alexander Stille

FROM THE COVER: “In Turin, Ettore Ovazza founded a Jewish fascist movement and met with Mussolini, while Vitorio Foa joined the antifascist underground and went to prison after being betrayed by someone from his own group. In Rome, the Di Verolis lived outside of time, working as peddlers in a ghetto older than Christ-until the Germans arrived. In Genoa, Massimo Teglio worked hand-in-glove with the Catholic Church to save hundreds of Jews. And the Schönheits of Ferrara helped administer an Italian concentration camp, until being deported to Germany themselves and making their miraculous return.

This extraordinary montage--combining interview, narrative, and the evocation of Italian culture-depicts the lives of five Italian Jewish families whose experiences embody the paradoxical climate of benevolence and betrayal, and resurrects a forgotten and deeply tragic era in the history of two peoples.

"An achievement that deserves to stand next to the most insightful fiction about life and death under fascism." -Herbert Mitgang, The New York Times.

London. Penguin 1991. 362p

By R. J. B. Bosworth

From the Preface: “My task… has been to unveil the lives of Italians under a generation of dictatorship, be they men, women or children, party officials and party intellectuals or anti-Fascists, landowners and industrialists or workers and peasants, all coming from the many and varied regions of Italy or, on occasion, emigrants passed beyond the national border. It is, of course, an impossible protect. Aspiring to write the tout history of a totalitarian society is a delusion. Yet any reader who consults the book’s pages will find that a vast array of people rum up »n my tale and that it spans from Sardinia to Sicily, from Tumi to Reggio Calabria, from Trieste to Bari and beyond. There are many stories in the pages that follow and my hope must be that readers will find them emblematic and will draw a general picture from their impressionist detail.”

London. Penguin. 2005. 689p.