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| Fascist Directive | Monstrous Century |
CATHERINE PAUL
FASCIST DIRECTIVE: EZRA POUND AND ITALIAN CULTURAL NATIONALISM
Clemson: Clemson UP; Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2016. 364p. ISBN 9781942954057.
In 1938, American poet Ezra Pound published Guide to Kulchur, a book so radically different from his earlier writing that readers might not have believed that it was written by the same firebrand aesthetician who had advocated in 1913 that poets go in fear of abstractions. But Guide to Kulchur was only the latest example of a new kind of prose that Pound had been writing—fiercely invested in politics and the mobilization of cultural heritage to its service. Pound’s new modernism came as a direct effect of his investment in fascism. Since the last monographic treatment of Pound’s fascism, scholars of literature, history, art history, urban design, and music have uncovered important aspects of the fascist regime’s use of culture to foment Italian national identity. These studies reveal the cultural, mythical, rhetorical, and intellectual aspects of that regime—more than enough new knowledge to require a reappraisal of perhaps the most famous, certainly the most notorious, American in Italy in that era, and perhaps the entire twentieth century. Unlike previous discussions of Pound’s adoption of Italian fascism, which focus mostly on his political and economic interests, this book reveals the importance of the cultural projects of Mussolini’s fascist regime. Paul shows how Pound’s modernism changed as a result of involvement in Italian politics and culture. At the same time, it uses the familiar figure of Pound to provide an entry for scholars of Anglo-American modernism into the diverse and complex realm of Italian modernism.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter 1. Introduction: Italian Cultural Nationalism.
Chapter 2. Renaissance Revisited: Pound’s Foray into Italian Cultural Nationalism.
Chapter 3. The Bundle and the Pickaxe: Fascist Cultural Projects.
Chapter 4. Ezra Pound and/or the Fascist Gerarchia.
Chapter 5. The Fascist Cultural Nationalism of the Vivaldi Revival.
Chapter 6. Italian Fascist Exhibitions and Pound’s Fascist Directive.
Chapter 7. Propaganda Art: Can a Poet Be a Traitor?
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STODDARD MARTIN
MONSTROUS CENTURY. ESSAYS IN THE AGE OF THE FEUILLETON
London: Starhaven, 2016. 210p. ISBN 978-0936315409
His subjects, even when unsympathetic in themselves, are viewed in the round, and judged with humanity. Yet he also has a strong moral impulse, as evidenced by the title of this collection. So although he can roam as far back temporally as Perkin Warbeck, and into magical regions with Orpheus, we see in his work a frequent return to more recent periods, and a nagging anxiety to explain why and how Europe went so badly wrong between 1900 and 2000 – particularly the dread duodecennium 1939-1945
Derek Turner, Quarterly Review
CONTENTS :
Preface
Introduction: In ‘the Age of the Feuilleton’
1 Verdi vs. Wagner
2 Cosima Wagner
3 Stefan Zweig
4 Late Fame
5 Young Törless
6 Shooting Mussolini
7 Gabriele D’Annunzio
8 Joseph Roth
9 Music in the Third Reich
10 Himmler & wife
11 Josef Goebbels
12 A World’s End
13 Hanns & Rudolf
14 Resző Kasztner
15 Raoul Wallenberg
16 Céline
17 Romain Gary
18 Jean Améry
19 Eliot, Pound & Anti-Semitism
20 Hemingway & D’Annunzio
21 Nietzsche in America
22 Zweig Redux
23 Prague
24 Goodbye Vienna
25 The Sociologists
26 Americanization of the Holocaust
27 Writing about the War
28 Mission to Kabul
29 Newman & the Pope
30 Orpheus Rising
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