Selections from Cultural Writings - Hardcover

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9780674799851: Selections from Cultural Writings

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674799852 ISBN 13: 9780674799851

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1985

Though he died as Benito Mussolini's prisoner, leaving only newspaper articles and fragmentary notes, Antonio Gramsci is now seen as the most significant Marxist thinker since Lenin. This volume is the first English translation of his writings on culture, organically and coherently edited from his journalism and his Prison Notebooks.

Gramsci writes about the popular and the great artists from Jules Verne to Dante, but not as so many timeless monuments. He sees artworks in the context of their reception and their absorption in particular cultures and histories. He is sensitive to the politics of culture as well as to the demands of philological scholarship, as his superb work on Dante in this volume shows. We have in this book Gramsci's changing views on particular literary movements and authors, as well as his ideas on the nature of proletarian and popular cultural criticism. Throughout he is concerned with cultural analysis and strategy rather than literary criticism by itself. The headnotes and footnotes prepared by Forgacs and Nowell-Smith address themselves both to the circumstances surrounding the composition of each segment and to the central problems of contemporary Gramsci scholarship. Antonio Gramsci is the twentieth-century writer who has most brilliantly and suggestively explored the ties that bind culture and politics. The publication of this collection is an event of major significance for theorists of all sorts.

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About the Author:

Antonio Gramsci (January 22, 1891 – April 27, 1937) was a founding member of the Italian Communist Party, and spent most of his adult life imprisoned by Mussolini for his opposition to the Fascist regime. After his death and the subsequent publication of his Prison Notebooks he came to be known as one of the 20th century's foremost cultural critics, and is widely recognized as an important theorist of class, culture, and the state.

Geoffrey Nowell-Smith is Honorary Professorial Fellow at Queen Mary University of London. He was co-translator and co-editor with Quintin Hoare of Antonio Gramscis's Selections from Prison Notebooks (L&W and International Publishers, NY, 1971). He is Editor of The Oxford History of World Cinema (Oxford and New York: OUP, 1996) and his most recent book is Making Waves: New Cinemas of the 1960s (NY and London: Continuum, 2008). His history of the British Film Institute (with Christophe Dupin) will appear from Manchester University Press in fall 2011.

David Forgacs is Professor of Italian at University College London and author of Rome Open City in the BFI Film Classics series.

Language Notes:

Text: English, Italian (translation)

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