Censorship and literature in fascist Italy / Guido Bonsaver.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Examining the breadth and scope of censorship in Fascist Italy, from Mussolini's role as 'prime censor' to the specific experiences of female writers, this is a fascinating look at the vulnerability of culture under a dictatorship.

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CHOICE Review

Exhaustively researched, skillfully structured, and lucidly and agreeably written, this book does what only the very best of a certain kind of historical writing can do: it plunges deep into dust-smothered archives and comes back with the formative material of a genuinely enlightening argument. Bonsaver (Oxford Univ.) painstakingly traces the shifting attitudes and practices connected with literary censorship in Fascist Italy, persuasively identifying three principal epochs: an initial one (1922-33) in which "Mussolini takes the helm" and stamps a whole culture with his corrupt personal authority; a second period (1934-39) in which "censorship Fascist style" flourishes to repellent effect; and the (fortunately) terminal phase (1940-43), "a nation at war." A mass of information, gathered from government and publishers' archives and authors' writings and correspondence, relentlessly documents the process by which almost the entire literary intelligentsia of a civilized nation compromised its integrity at the behest of dangerous buffoons. No one even remotely interested in the literature of 20th-century Italy should pass up the chance to learn from this unprecedented and surely definitive study a lesson at once historical and moral. Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. S. Botterill University of California, Berkeley