The Search for Modern Tragedy
Subtitle: Aesthetic Fascism in Italy and France
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: December 2001
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 272
ISBN-13: 9780801438370
Subjects: Literary studies: from c 1900 -; Italian drama (Tragedy); Fascism; Literature - Classics / Criticism; Literary Criticism; Italy; Drama; European - General; 20th century; History and criticism; Italian drama
First sentence: Although the focus of this book is on literary drama informed by aesthetic fascism rather than the practice of fascist aesthetics in theatrical production, some notion of the latter is essential to an understanding of fascist ideology in regard to theater.
Description: "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."--BOOK JACKET.