Fall/Winter 2006 - University of Toronto Press Publishing

I TA L I A N S T U D I E S
Italian Cultural Lineages
Jonathan White
TORONTO ITALIAN STUDIES
In Italian Cultural Lineages, Jonathan White seeks
answers to the elusive questions: what is Italian
culture and what is the Italian identity By tracing
Italian life and art through several themes – viewing
and spectatorship, fantasy, passion, justice, reputation,
and lifestyles – White offers new ways of perceiving
an ancient cultural tradition in the twentyfirst
century. In doing so, he challenges readers to
discern rich poetic seams that bind together his
varied subject matter.
Italian Cultural Lineages is primarily concerned
with factors that unify Italians, however geographically
dispersed they may be. Drawing on extensive
archival and historical research, White shows how
oftentimes Italian cultural traditions that appear
to be extinct are, in fact, enduring – pushed out
of the mainstream or submerged at some given
point in history, only to re-surface and take on new
meanings at a later date. Other, more marginal currents
might disrupt and fragment Italian identity,
politically and socially. However, White proposes
that the challenge to Italy in these new and difficult
lessons in tolerance has the potential to produce
a much stronger culture, primed to welcome the
marginal into an expanded spirit of all that counts
as Italian. Ideally suited to course use, and written
with great lucidity, Italian Cultural Lineages will
prove fascinating to students, academics, and general
readers alike.
Jonathan White is Reader in Literature at the
University of Essex.
World’s Fairs Italian-Style
The Great Expositions in Turin and their Narratives,
1860–1915
Cristina Della Coletta
TORONTO ITALIAN STUDIES
According to conventional wisdom, Italy was not
an influential participant in the nationalistic and
imperialistic discourses that world’s fairs produced
in countries such as Great Britain, France, and
the United States. In the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, however, Italy hosted numerous
national and international exhibitions expounding
notions of national identity, imperial expansion,
technological progress, and capitalist growth.
World’s Fairs Italian-Style explores world’s fairs in
Italy at the turn of the twentieth century in comparison
to their more famous counterparts in France, England,
and the United States. Cristina Della Coletta demonstrates
that, because of its social fragmentation and
hybrid history, Italy was a site of both hegemony and
subordination – an aspiring imperial power whose colonization
started from within. She focuses on two bestselling
authors, Emilio Salgari and Guido Gozzano,
and illustrates how these authors interpreted their age’s
‘exposition mentality.’ Salgari and Gozzano’s exposition
narratives, Della Coletta argues, reveal Italy’s uncertainties
about own sense of national identity, and its belated
commitment to Western imperialism.
Of interest to students and scholars of literature,
cultural history, and Italian, World’s Fairs Italian-
Style provides a fascinating glimpse into a hitherto
unexplored area of study, and brings to light a cultural
phenomenon that played a significant role in
shaping Italy’s national identity.
Cristina Della Coletta is an associate professor in the
Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese at
the University of Virginia.
Approx. 336pp / 6 x 9 / January 2007
24 Photographs
Cloth ISBN 0-8020-9230-6 / 978-0-8020-9230-4
£48.00 $75.00 E
Paper ISBN 0-8020-9458-9 / 978-0-8020-9458-2
£22.50 $35.00 C
Approx. 400 pp / 6 x 9 / December 2006
20 illustrations
Cloth ISBN 0-8020-9115-6 / 978-08020-9115-4
£45.00 $70.00 E
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