Neorealism and the "New" Italy: Compassion in the Development of Italian Identity

Neorealism and the "New" Italy centers on neorealist Italian artists' use of compassion as a vehicle to express their characters' interactions. Simonetta Milli Konewko proposes that compassion as an emotion may be activated to unify certain individuals and communities and investigates the mechanisms that allowed compassion to operate during the postwar period. Aiming to produce a deeper understanding of the ways in which Italy is re-encoded and reconstructed, this book explores the formation of Italian identity and redefines neorealism as a topic of investigation.  

Simonetta Milli Konewko is Associate Professor in the Department of French, Italian and Comparative Languages at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, USA. Her articles have appeared in Forum Italicum, Rivista di Studi Italiani, Holocaust and Modernity, Sinestesie, Journal of Literature and Art Studies, and Athens Journal of Humanities & Art.