Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

At a time when conceptions of the nation-state are under examination, even erasure, through the proliferating critical literature on postmodernity and globality, editors Albert Russell Ascoli and Krystyna von Henneberg set as their admirably complex objective to examine the cultural forms and political discourses that have subtended Italian nation formation. Focusing on the Risorgimento, the contributors to this collection of essays represent a variety of disciplines in Italian studies: history, art history, literature, film, music, cultural studies, and feminist theory. The volume seeks to break down traditional divisions, methodologies, and disciplinary formations in the study of Italian history, culture, politics, and society. The essays address conflicting views of the Risorgimento from the nineteenth century to the present, asking what role did uses of the past play in creating the conceptions of the Risorgimento? How is Italian unity to be understood given the prevalence of divergent interpretations based on parochial political interests and given the ubiquitous role of the "Southern Question"? Was the Risorgimento emblematic of profound cleavages rather than emblematic of the emergence of a national identity? Were the struggles for Italian unification unique to that country or similar to other European countries? What role did art and literature play in the construction of and legitimation of cultural distinctiveness? What was the relationship between fascism and the Risorgimento? And, finally, since the volume is concerned to trace the impact of the past on the present, what is the legacy of constructions of the Risorgimento?	1
The authors take various routes to address these questions. Adrian Lytelton investigates how the Middle Ages and the Renaissance became—for painters such as Francisco Hayez and novelists such as Alessandro Manzoni and Massimo D'Azeglio—a means of providing requisite, if contradictory, historical parallels between past and present. As Lytelton's essay demonstrates, certain figures are indispensable for an understanding of how the Italian national past was created. For example, Andrea Ciccarelli focuses on how Dante, rather than Petrarch, became one of these seminal figures, a barometer of differing attitudes toward the culture of the Risorgimento and later of fascism. Dante, according to writers such as Manzoni and Emilio Marinetti and critics such as Francesco de Sanctis, Scipio Slataper, and La voce, became a cultural icon. Giuseppe Verdi was another icon of the Risorgimento, and Mary Ann Smart demystifies the patriotic aura attributed to Nabucco's "Va pensiero." While not defacing Verdi's heroic image, Smart calls attention to how the music acts as "a nostalgic invocation to nation" rather than a call to "action, change, or movement" (p. 106). Smart also discusses lesser known and less celebrated but more illuminating instances of links between Verdi's operas and the politics of the Risorgimento (e. g. La battaglia di Legnano).	2
No text that purports to reexamine the formation of Italian culture and politics can evade the "Southern Question," and Nelson Moe's essay, "This Is Africa," is an exemplary exploration of how the south was constructed as a backward area, a locus of disease and crime, and a home of brutes and savages in need of discipline and education (though, also as in the case of other colonized areas, "picturesque"). While readers may be familiar with these descriptions of the south, they may not be aware of how specifically they are aligned to military and political strategies during the Risorgimento and beyond. Lucia Re's essay on representations of women writers in the works of painters and writers during the Risorgimento and later nineteenth century parallels Moe's discussion of the subjugation of the south by the dominant moderate leadership. Centering her discussion in a painting of Federico Faruffuni, "The Female Reader," Re explores the "anxiety generated by the very notion of female authorship in Italian culture of the nineteenth and even early twentieth century" (p. 159).	. . .