Title: The search for modern tragedy : aesthetic fascism in Italy and France /
Authors: Witt, Mary Ann Frese
Publisher: Cornell University Press,
Year: 2001
Subjects: Italian drama History and criticism.; Italian drama (Tragedy) History and criticism.; Fascism Italy; Politics and literature Italy History; Fascism in literature.; French drama History and criticism.; French drama (Tragedy) History and criticism.; Politics and literature France History; Fascism France
Abstract: "The attempt to apply an aesthetic or literary approach to fascism remains controversial. In The Search for Modern Tragedy, Mary Ann Frese Witt explores the work of a group of European writers and artists who came to fascism by way of aesthetics. In Italy and France, she maintains, an ideological aesthetic of "Mediterranean" fascism developed to a large extent independently of German Nazism. Witt's study of the relationship between fascism and modern tragedy encompasses theoretical writing on tragedy and tragedies by key authors, including Luigi Pirandello, Henry de Montherlant, and Jean Anouilh. She looks at these tragedies in the context of their reception under fascism in Italy and in Vichy France."--Jacket.
Contents: Theatricality and tragedy in fascist Italy -- D'Annunzio's Nietzschean tragedy and the aesthetic politics of fusion -- Pirandellian fascism, metatragedy, and myth -- French aesthetic fascism in the 1930s on tragic grandeur and purity -- Aesthetic fascism and French modern tragedy under the German occupation: montherlandt and Annouilh.