Italy
The Enduring Culture
Description:... This study of dynamic continuities as well as crises and fissures in Italian culture, takes an interdisciplinary culturalist approach. In an age of academic monographs on increasingly specialized topics, it bucks the trend by looking in a highly comparative way at several different ages in the formation of modern Italy, onwards from the rapid rise of powerful merchant cities in Dante's time to millennial change of the present technological age. Its coverage extends to literature, art history, opera, film, sexuality, urbanism, the mafia, and population movements of emigration and immigration. Specifically, it looks at how Italy has incorporated and continually represents its past, in changing ways to meet changed times. Examples include a chapter on 18th century Venice that reveals the city's ambivalence as a living myth, its waterbound houses functioning alternatively in the collective mind as figures of decadence and death as well as figures of life, fulfillment and the birth of the future. Other chapters look at the age-old culture of death in Sicily in the light of Mafia killings of public figures and Italian emigration abroad. The book asks at every point how modern culture and society in Italy have emerged from earlier configurations, and how far and for what reasons they differ from individual past moments. White asks how Italy might be considered a kind of political laboratory in which Western cultures can read their own futures; in other words, he wonders, how far does Italy hold the status of paradigm, such that our reflections upon Italy past and present are bound also to throw light on other cultures. The book also considers in the context of Italian emigration, whatqualities of Italianess survive in the transplanted espresso bars, luxury goods and musical culture in these far-flung Italian communities. Can our re
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