Prison terms
Subtitle: representing confinement during and after Italian fascism
By: Ellen V. Nerenberg.
Series: Toronto Italian studies
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: 2001
Place of publication: Toronto
Language: eng
Number of pages: 259
Subjects: Italian literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism.; Prisons in literature.; Imprisonment in literature.; Fascism and culture -- Italy.; Fascism and literature -- Italy.; Fascism in literature.; Littérature italienne -- 20e siècle -- Histoire et critique.; Emprisonnement dans la littérature.
Description: "In this work, Ellen Nerenberg offers an analysis of the confinement experience in Italian narrative between 1930 and 1960, the last fifteen years of Fascism and the fifteen that followed. Nerenberg diverges from the notion that a radical break from Fascism coincided with Mussolini's fall, instead revealing a disturbing continuity of social restraints following the Second World War.".

"Drawing on critical discourses of architectural design, urban planning, and cultural geography, Nerenberg offers readings of Buzzati, Piovene, de Cespedes, Banti, Morante, Pratolini, and Gadda. Not limiting herself to prisons, she also explores military barracks, convents, brothels, and homes as carceral homologues.

In a surprising investigation of the male body as defined by the architectural space of the barracks and the discursive practices of military guides and journals, she challenges the notion circulated during Fascism of a homogeneous model of masculinity. She also probes the social and symbolic positions of women in relation to confinement, the law, power, and liberty.

In a chapter entitled 'House Arrest,' she treats the ominous space of the home as a homologue for prison wherein 'women are induced into criminality.'" "A study of literal and literary spaces during and after Italian Fascism, this work examines the ways in which Fascist cultural and discursive practices and ideology have endured in various guises."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [223]-252) and index.