Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini's Italy (Studies on the History of Society and Culture) - Hardcover

Falasca-Zamponi, Simonetta

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520206231 ISBN 13: 9780520206236

Publisher: University of California Press, 1997

Synopsis

This richly textured cultural history of Italian fascism traces the narrative path that accompanied the making of the regime and the construction of Mussolini's power. Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi reads fascist myths, rituals, images, and speeches as texts that tell the story of fascism. Linking Mussolini's elaboration of a new ruling style to the shaping of the regime's identity, she finds that in searching for symbolic means and forms that would represent its political novelty, fascism in fact brought itself into being, creating its own power and history.

Falasca-Zamponi argues that an aesthetically founded notion of politics guided fascist power's historical unfolding and determined the fascist regime's violent understanding of social relations, its desensitized and dehumanized claims to creation, its privileging of form over ethical norms, and ultimately its truly totalitarian nature.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

"An excellent and timely book. The idea of studying Italiam fascism as a 'society of the spectacle' that used symbols, rituals, and a cult of the leader to create itself as it unfolded is a brilliant stroke."—Walter L. Adamson, author of Avant-Garde Florence: From Modernism to Fascism

About the Author:

Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi is Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0520206231
• ISBN 13: 9780520206236
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 319