Tracking ‘Same–Sex Love’ from Antiquity to the Present in South Asia

This essay focuses on the anthology Same–Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History (2000), edited by Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai. Unlike many other recently published, celebratory ‘gay anthologies’, this book contributes to ongoing scholarly work on specific same–sex erotic practices and relations in historical and cultural context. We examine issues relevant to this anthology and other such projects: the use of ‘love’ and ‘same–sex’ as (stable) signifiers over centuries; the validity of interpreting social reality through literary texts from the period; the difficulties of locating ‘love’ in severely hierarchical, even slave–owning, societies; and the implications of using such anthologies in the classroom.     

The first reception of James Steuart in Italy: Giovanni Tamassia and his liberal economic reading of the Principles of Political Economy

This article has two aims. The first is to explore the early reception of James Steuart in Italy, focusing on Giovanni Tamassia’s writings. In his Dello spirito di riforma, written between 1799 and 1800, Tamassia was the first Italian author to assume Steuart as a point of reference in economic analysis. Largely re-proposing Steuart’s considerations on the issues of redistribution of land, of luxury, and of comparison between ancient and modern times, he contributed decisively to the first circulation in Italy of the Principles of Political Economy. The second aim is to shed light on the singular reading given by Tamassia of Steuart’s thought. In his works Lezione di economia politica and Delle scienze e della libertà relativamente al commercio, the Italian author proposed an economic liberal reading of the Principles. Deliberately downplaying the importance attributed by Steuart to protectionist policies, he attempted to demonstrate the compatibility between the economic theories of Steuart and those of Smith in the matter of economic freedom. Rather than being based on the grounds of a rigorous economic analysis, Tamassia’s reading reflected a deliberate attempt to make Steuart’s thought compatible with an economic and political culture centred on the defence of freedom.     

“Celticism,ballad transmission,and the schizoid voice: Ossianic fragments in Owenson,Yeats, Joyce,and Beckett”

ABSTRACT

This essay surveys responses to Macpherson’s Ossian in Irish literature, alongside analysis of the development of literary Celticism. Despite being a key text behind the development of Celticism in Irish writing, Ossian is consciously rejected in Irish Romanticism and in the Celtic Revival. However, Ossian becomes a symbol of literary recycling and mental fragmentation in Irish Modernism. Texts studied in this essay include Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, and Beckett’s Murphy.     

Liberation and literature: Naples 1944

The arrival of Anglo‐American forces in Naples on 1 October 1943 precipitated the structural crisis which had beset the capital of the south since its integration into the Italian nation‐state in 1860. This crisis had been masked by the reassuringly engaging ethos of napoletanità, encoded in the urban dialect and crystallized in its literary culture from Matilde Serao and Salvatore Di Giacomo onwards. The myth of napoletanità had been frozen under Fascism, but was shattered by the experience of the war years and after, and only factitiously restored under the political hegemony of the monarchist ship owner Achille Lauro during the 1950s. Young literary Americans such as John Home Burns and William Weaver, who found themselves in Naples with the occupying Allied forces, fell under its spell, while the equally young British military intelligence officer Norman Lewis maintained a detached, but sympathetic, objectivity. The older Tuscan writer, Curzio Malaparte, so provocatively transformed the image of Naples as to earn furious rejection by the city's dominant postwar political circles and by Italy's literary circles. Yet, despite brilliant attempts at restoration by the departed Neapolitan, Giuseppe Marotta, and the much‐loved actor‐playwright Eduardo De Filippo, napoletanità was systematically undermined and demolished by younger Neapolitan writers from Domenico Rea and Anna Maria Ortese to Raffaele La Capria as the city's urban fabric was transformed by appallingly irresponsible property speculators. This article focuses on the literary anthropology of Naples in the 1940s. It explores literary texts and contexts, and the way they problematize Naples as a unified subject or object. It addresses the paradoxical issue of the city's need for liberation from itself, and the time scale of a liberation that perhaps has always been and always will be in fieri.     

The man who never was? The Italian transition and 2008 election

Abstract

The implications for the co-called Italian transition of the 2008 election initially seemed significant – but have since become increasingly uncertain as Berlusconi's conflict of interests has risen higher up the political agenda. This underscores the pertinence of asking about the sense in which the notion of ‘transition’ is actually applicable to the Italian case at all – bearing in mind that it describes a process now supposedly underway for some 17 years; and bearing in mind that its end point can seemingly not be identified (though by definition ‘transition’ implies movement between two points). Discovering if the term applies to the Italian case and if so whether 2008 has brought its conclusion nearer requires exploring if the political protagonists that have emerged from the election as the most significant players – the Popolo della Libertà and the Partito Democratico – have sufficient commonality of view, sufficient desire and sufficient power to complete a process of constitutional overhaul. The evidence suggests that while they have the view and the desire, there are significant limitations on their power. The election might potentially have been a watershed in the so-called Italian transition in the broader sense of system performance, aside from formal constitutional change. Here too, however, the evidence points away from the idea that 2008 represents a real sea change – though the chances seem good that it will come to be perceived as such.     

Celebrating Decadence: The Image of Abruzzo in D’Annunzio’s Trionfo della morte

Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938) was one of the most peculiar figures among the European fin-de-siècle intellectuals and Italian decadentismo. Although he spent most of his life mingling with the high society of different Italian cities, D’Annunzio remained tied to the place of his birth in the remote region of Abruzzo. This article surveys D’Annunzio’s representation of Abruzzo in his 1894 novel Trionfo della morte (The Triumph of Death). The focus is on the different sources and strategies D’Annunzio used to create an image of his native region. I argue that the representation of Abruzzo as a primitive wilderness not only reflects D’Annunzio’s social critique but was also driven by purely economic concerns. By exploiting the style of other literary classics and by playing on the popular taste for the macabre, D’Annunzio, I suggest, intended to make the novel more attractive to the book market and at the same time to mystify his own personality.     

In visibilities: the Groupe du 6 novembre and the production of liberal lesbian identity in contemporary France

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the little-known contributions of a Paris-based activist group of self-identified lesbians of colour, the Groupe du 6 novembre, which formed in 1999. Their self-published anthology, entitled Warriors/Guerrières, contests the racism of French feminist and LGBT community and culture and examines sexual minority visibility through an intersectional lens. This anthology was unfortunately contested and all but censored by organisations that purportedly sought to promote lesbian culture and self-expression. The Groupe du 6 novembre’s erasure is symptomatic of the ways in which the seemingly laudable aim of combating lesbian invisibility—within both scholarship and activism—can actually serve to marginalise racialised lesbians. Through close readings of the Groupe’s poetry and prose and documentation of their history, this article will argue that dominant conceptions of lesbian sexual identity are imbued with liberal racism and Republican universalism. At a time of increasing concern that certain forms of feminist and LGBT politics are being co-opted by the State to racist ends, the Groupe du 6 novembre constitutes an essential chapter in French feminist history and literature.     

The Tenco effect. Suicide,San Remo,and the social construction of the canzone d'autore

Abstract

Canzone d'autore is an indigenous expression that has no precise equivalent in other languages. Its social use identifies a genre of popular song that presuppose the existence of an ‘autore’ taken in its most vigorous sense, meaning a ‘creator’, an ‘artist’– but how did this claim to artistry originate? How did it insinuate itself into the world of song, a genre that by definition belongs to the realm of what is traditionally called in Italian ‘musica leggera,’ with unmistakably pejorative connotations? In this essay, I will put forward a sociological interpretation of the genesis of the canzone d'autore, using as a strategic conceptual device the idea of cultural trauma. The traumatic event that I propose to explore, making use of this concept and its analytical machinery, is the suicide of the singer-songwriter Luigi Tenco during the seventeenth San Remo ‘Festival della Canzone’ (‘song festival’) – that is the best-known, most controversial, and most influential single event in the field of Italian ‘musica leggera’, an annual event regularly attended every year – via radio, television, or audience participation – by millions of Italians. Through a reconstruction of that suicide and above all of the public and dramatic events that followed in response to it, the paper examines the social process that transformed an individual tragedy into a collective, social drama, a process that not only produced a new musical classification, but also a new cultural and aesthetic category.     

Transatlantic Catholic responses to Fascist anti-Semitism: the Racial Laws of 1938 in the Jesuit press of America and Civiltà Cattolica

ABSTRACT

This article examines the Catholic responses to the Fascist Racial Laws in a transatlantic and comparative perspective. It looks specifically at two foremost publications of the Jesuit press in Rome and New York: Civiltà Cattolica and America, respectively. The comparative approach helps to comprehend the variety of factors behind editorial choices: readership, political context, Vatican directions, censorship, and silence. Jesuits on both sides of the Atlantic interpreted the anti-Semitic turn of the Fascist regime as an imitation of Nazi Germany and with the persistent hope that Italian policies would be milder and more ‘civilized’. The shaping of the myth of the ‘good Italian’ was an early process in which Church voices, including the Pope himself, took a significant part. This article argues that despite contextual differences, both Jesuit publications demonstrated a transnational pattern of Catholic relation to the Jews: endorsing Pius XI’s statements, they spoke out against racism but did not extend their condemnations to a full rejection of anti-Semitism in its religious and secular components. The disapproval of Italy’s Racial Laws was not a defense of the Jews of Italy.     

11 September 2001: the Italian writers’ response

One month after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York, the Corriere della Sera published an article on the possible future consequences for literature of this horrific event. Some novelists boldly declared their work would not be affected at all, while others observed that their literary visions and perspectives were already responses to life's tragic aspects. Several writers confessed to wondering, at least initially, whether literature henceforth could continue to have any real sense. A decade later, this essay examines the nature of the Italian response. It looks first at the views of those writers who expressed opinions directly to the press or in essay form, and then at a small number of novels (by Tullio Avoledo, Marisa Bulgheroni and Tiziana Rinaldi Castro) and short stories (by Andrea Piva, Andrej Longo and Andrea Canobbio) which have embraced the theme, and which have done so in ways that reinforce the sense of an underlying political and/or cultural aesthetic. Connections between twenty-first-century reactions to 9/11 and the Italian experience or memory of political terrorism and war will be explored, as well as the question of inspiration for novelists, in the particular context of catastrophe or trauma.     

La Méditerranée solide: un espace double en construction

There exists a space of the ‘solid Mediterranean’. This concept was first proposed by the Annales’s co-founder Lucien Febvre in 1944–45, during a course on Europe in the longue durée. The flexible borders of this double space, both conceptual and contextual, remain in construction within the on-going and global reality of the solid Mediterranean’s space. The comparative history of European societies promoted during the interwar period by Marc Bloch, the other Annales founder, contributes to the construction of said space. Examining this space allows us to concretely articulate scales of analysis from the local to the global. The article is based on a comparative analysis of two Italian and Spanish cases that appear to be particular and paradigmatic (‘exceptional normal’, Edoardo Grendi) of – respectively – Italy’s so-called ‘southern question’ (questione meridionale) and the Spanish ‘agrarian question’ (cuestión agraria). Thus the article helps to conceptualize the space of the Méditerranée solide, marked by the complex and long-term Southern European question. The article compares Il Ministro della mala vita (The Minister of the Corruption, 1910) by historian Gaetano Salvemini and Del caciquismo trágico (On Tragical Caciquism, 1913) by republican journalist Pedro Torres. Through these ‘exceptionally normal’ case studies, taken together and explained reciprocally, it is possible to better understand the space of the solid Mediterranean. The social realities of the Spanish cuestión agraria and the Italian questione meridionale, as well as the conditions of local historiographical production on such realities are, indeed, a consubstantial part of the European transnational, global space of the ‘solid Mediterranean’.     

‘I draw a line here and open a new chapter’: The Bagrow-Almagià Correspondence 1947–1955

ABSTRACT

The Imago Mundi archives, held in the Map Library of the British Library in London, contain the correspondence between Leo Bagrow, the founding editor of Imago Mundi, and the Italian geographer and historian of cartography Roberto Almagià. Their correspondence, which continued throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, brought out the worst in their very different characters, at times to an almost comical extent. The exchanges reveal Bagrow’s somewhat brusque editorial methods but also show his vision for Imago Mundi and demonstrate his total dedication to the history of cartography. The letters also provide a revealing commentary on the immense difficulties of international communication and research in the immediate post-war years, and the persistence of the cultural nationalism that dominated the history of cartography as an academic pursuit in this period.     

Paragone: notes on hegemony and realism in the 1950s

This article focuses on the literary review Paragone and on the debate on realism articulated by the review and by the Cultural Commission of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in the 1950s. By analysing the review’s internal composition, correspondence between its contributors, and records of the PCI’s Cultural Commission, this article highlights a series of issues relating to the debate on realism in the 1950s, as a critical time, in both aesthetic and political terms, for the determination of Italian culture’s identity profile. Specifically, the article discusses the key features of the debate on realism that unfolded in Paragone, and relates these to the debate simultaneously developing within the Cultural Commission. This comparison allows us to argue for a close connection between the aesthetic habitus displayed by an independent review and that embraced by a cultural institution with a distinctly political as well as cultural agenda.     

Doing Italian history: Pleasure and politics

This is the second part of a general historiographical review of recent studies on the formation of a modern Italian nation and national identities. The review is organized chronologically, and this second part covers literature on the development of the Italian state and society from Fascism to the birth of the Republic. Si tratta della seconda parte di una articolo dedicato al tema del proceso di 'nation and state building' e modernizzazione in Italia, con particolare attenzione per i temi della costruzione della macchina statale e dell'identità nazionale. La prima parte si era soffermata sul periodo risorgimentale e sull'Italia liberale fino alla prima guerra mondiale e all'avvento del regime fascista. L'articolo tenta di ricostruire in maniera critica i nuovi contributi interpretativi di un dibattito come quello sul processo di costruzione dello stato nazionale unitario, che di recente sembra essersi riacceso, collocandoli nel solco di una tradizione storiografica sul tema, oramai consolidata. Accanto a questa, infatti, sembra farsi strada una nuova stagione di studi, molto meno ancorata al peso che per lungo tempo hanno esercitato i differenti condizionamenti ideologici. In questa seconda parte vengono analizzate le interpretazioni storiografiche, basate su nuove ricerche recentemente condotte, sul ventennio fascista e sulla nascità e lo sviluppo dell'Italia Repubblicana.     

Book reviews

Luciano Guerci and Giuseppe Ricuperati (eds) 1998 Il coraggio della ragione. Franco Venturi intellettuale e storico cosmopolita (Atti del Convegno internazionale di studi promosso da Fondazione Luigi Einaudi, Università degli Studi di Torino, Accademia delle Scienze, Deputazione Subalpina di Storia Patria, Torino, 12–14 dicembre 1996) (Turin: Fondazione Luigi Einaudi), pp. 1–497, ISBN 88–430–1129–4.

Stefano Levati ( 1997) La nobiltà del lavoro. Negozianti e banchieri a Milano tra Ancien Regime e Restaurazione (Milan: Franco Angeli), pp. 1–320, 40,000 lire.

Guido Formigoni (1998) L'Italia dei cattolici: Fede e nazione dal Risorgimento alla Repubblica (Bologna: Il Mulino), pp. 1–176, 22,000 lire, ISBN 88–15–06314–5 paperback.

Albert Schram ( 1997) Railways and the Formation of the Italian State in the Nineteenth Century, ’Cambridge Studies in Italian History and Culture’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 1–164, Bibliography and Index, $59.95, ISBN 0–521–57159–6 hardback.

Catherine Brice (1989) Monumentanté publique et politique à Rome. Le Vittoriano (Rome: École Française de Rome), pp. 1–439.

Hans Woller ( 1997) I conti con il fascismo: L'epurazione in Italia 1943–1948 (Bologna: Il Mulino), pp. 1–603, 50,000 lire, ISBN 88–15–06198–3 paperback.

Maria Stone ( 1998) The Patron State: Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), pp. 1–334, ISBN 0–691–05999–3 paperback.

Angelo Ventrone (1996) La cittadinanza repubblicana. Forma‐partito e identità nazionale alle origini della democrazia italiana (1943–1948) (Bologna: Il Mulino), pp. 1–305, 38,000 lire, ISBN 88–15–05508–8 paperback.

R. J. B. Bosworth and Patrizia Dogliani (eds) (1999) kalian Fascism: History, Memory and Representation (Houndmills and New York: Macmillan/St Martin's Press), pp. 1–245, ISBN 0–312–21717.

Ernesto Galli della Loggia (1998) L'identità italiana (Bologna: Il Mulino), pp. 1–171, 18,000 lire, ISBN 88–15–066 12–8 paperback.

Aldino Monti (1998) I braccianti (Bologna: Il Mulino), pp. 1–161, 18,000 lire, ISBN 88–15–06582–2 paperback.

Giuliana Gemelli (ed.) (1998) Scuole di management Orìgini e primi sviluppi delle business schools in Italia (Bologna: Il Mulino), pp. 1–543, ISBN 88–15–06297–1 paperback.

Valeria Fargion (1997) Geografia della cittadinanza sociale in Italia (Bologna: Il Mulino), pp. 1–351, 42,000 lire, ISBN 88–15–06127–4 paperback.

Umberto Gentiloni Silveri (1998) L'Italia e la nuova frontiera: Stati Uniti e centrosinistra 1958–1965 (Bologna: Il Mulino), pp. 1–343, 45,000 lire, ISBN 88–15–06282–3 paperback.     

Uncomfortable proximity. Literary technique,authorial provocations and dog whistles in Michel Houellebecq’s fiction

ABSTRACT

In 2002, following an interview with the magazine Lire where he described Islam as ‘la religion la plus con’, Michel Houellebecq was prosecuted, and eventually acquitted, for ‘injure raciale et incitation à la haine religieuse’. In discussions of Houellebecq’s case, supporters were quick to invoke the ‘special value’ of the literary space for the free discussion of ideas, however provocative or unpalatable. Houellebecq’s acquittal, and support from figures such as Salman Rushdie, have afforded the writer an unprecedented degree of literary freedom. Subsequent novels such as La Possibilité d’une île (2005) and Soumission (2015) show the author fully inhabiting this freedom in order to undertake a provocative critique of Islam. This article explores how both literary technique and authorial presence endorses the controversial ideas of his texts within Houellebecq’s writing and demonstrates how a movement from ambiguously undermining towards reinforcing those ideas can be observed. In particular, the framing of provocative ideas and assertions expounded in his fiction has become less robust throughout his career. This leads to, I suggest, a greater porosity between Houellebecq’s fiction and that of contemporary right-wing essayists such as Alain Finkielkraut and Renaud Camus.     

From superabilità to transabilità: towards an Italian disability studies

This article discusses recent academic and theoretical approaches to disability in Italy, situating them in relation to Anglo-American disability studies as well as within the Italian academic context, and sketches out the contours of an emergent Italian disability studies. The discussion centres on three terms that have emerged recently in Italy: superabilità (implying both ‘ability to overcome’ and ‘exceptional ability’); diversabilità (being ‘differently abled’); and transabilità (the desire for, or identification with, a disabled body by a non-disabled subject). The article considers the role of narrative in each of these categories, as well as the way that each deals with the question of limits. While discourses in each category construct or confirm a strong disabled identity, the article argues that transabilità might also be understood as the transcendence of identity on the basis of ability. This alternative understanding puts pressure on the question of identity itself and challenges the very need for narrative (re)construction.     

Sender,those who have not returned: Carlo Salsa and his ‘Trenches’

Abstract

Carlo Salsa’s book ‘Trenches: A foot-soldier’s tales’ (Trincee. Confidenze di un fante, 1924) was one of many published in Italy after the end of the First World War. It describes the facts of the war as they were lived by officers and soldiers on the Italian front line. The article tries to compare the book with the contemporary war literature in Italy and in Europe, without forgetting the use of the international historiography on the matter. Thus, it is analysed the way an Italian author described to his readers the brutal carnage of the war in years when Fascism was the rising star in Italian policy and the censorship was becoming the more and more a thornily factor for every writer of those days. From this analysis it is possible to note the quality of the volume both from the literary point of view, and its historical value as a reliable testimony of the facts, stepping up our knowledge of what the war literature was for the Italian public opinion after the 1918. As it is possible to note, the book puts under test our notions of the role played by this kind of literature in shaping the Italian political life at the end of the 1910s and at the start of 1920s, when Italy was becoming a country lead by the Fascist regime.     

María Zambrano’s and Albert Camus’s communal ethics

ABSTRACT

Maria Zambrano and Albert Camus had much in common, especially their sympathy for the Second Spanish Republic and their ethical vision. Both intellectuals employed literary forms to explore philosophical ideas allegorically, explicitly notions related to exile and solitude. Works included in the study are ‘Delirio de Antigone,’ La tumba de Antigone, and Delirio y destino [Delirum and Destiny] by Zambrano and The Plague and The Myth of Sysifus by Camus. Zambrano’s works are interpreted as allegories of Franco’s Spain, while Camus’s novel and essay represent Vichy France under the Nazis. Like Camus, Zambrano was a master of blending political, philosophical, and literary themes and genres.     

The Challenge of Modernity. Essays on Grazia Deledda

Sam Rohdie (1995) The Passion of Pier Paolo Pasolini (Bloomington and Indianapolis: British Film Institute and Indiana University Press), pp. i‐x, 1‐230, $15.95, ISBN 0‐85170‐518‐9 paperback; Patrick Rumble ( 1996) Allegories of Contamination: Pier Paolo Pasolini's ‘Trilogy of Life’ (Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press), pp. i‐ix, l‐207,$50,hardback, $ 17.95, paperback; Maurizio Viano (1993) A Certain Realism. Making Use of Pasolini's Film Theory and Practice (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press), pp. i‐xix, 1‐368, $40, hardback, $ 19.95, paperback.

Daniela Luigia Caglioti (1996) Associazionismo e sociabilità d'élite a Napoli nel XIX secolo (Naples: Liguori Editore), pp. 1‐169, 24,000 lire, ISBN 88‐207‐2637‐8 paperback.

Simone Neri Serneri (1995) Classe, partito, nazione. Alle origini della democrazia italiana, 1919‐1948 (Manduria: Piero Lacaita Editore), pp. 1‐298,25,000 lire, paperback.

Roberto Romani (1994) L'economia politica del Risorgimento italiano (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri), pp. 1‐248, ISBN 88‐339‐0856‐9 paperback.

Alberto M. Banti (1996) Storia della borghesia italiano: l'età liberait (Rome: Donzelli), pp. i‐xvii, 1‐395, 50,000 lire, ISBN 88‐7989‐170‐7 hardback.

Alexander J. De Grand ( 1995) Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. The ‘Fascist’ Style of Rule (London and New York; Routledge), pp. 1‐102, $ 10.95, ISBN 0‐415‐10598‐6 paperback; Richard Bessel (ed.) (1996) Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Comparisons and Contrasts (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press), pp. 1‐242, $54.95, ISBN 0‐521‐47129‐X hardback, $ 18.95, ISBN 0‐521‐47711‐5 paperback.

Enzo Collotti and Lutz Klinkhammer (1996) Il fascismo e l'Italia in guerra: Una conversazione fra storia e storiografia (Rome: Edizioni Ediesse), pp. 1‐202,20,000 lire, ISBN 88‐230‐0217‐6.

Michele Sarfatti ( 1994) Mussolini contro gli ebrei: Cronaca dell'elaborazione delle leggi del 1938 (Turin: Silvio Zamorani editore), pp. 1‐199,30,000 lire, ISBN 88‐7158‐033‐8 paperback.

Carl Ipsen (1996) Dictating Demography, the Problem of Population in Fascist Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. i‐xvii, 1‐281, $54.95 ISBN 0‐521‐554527 hardback.

Stephen Gundle ( 1995) I comunisti italiani tra Hollywood e Mosco. La sfida della cultura di massa (1943‐1991) (Florence: Giunti), pp. i‐xii, 1‐572, ISBN 88‐09‐20642‐8 paperback.

Carl Levy (ed.) (1996) Italian Regionalism: History, Identity and Politics (Oxford and Dulles, Va.: Berg), pp. i‐xvi, 1‐197, $39, ISBN 1‐85973‐131‐7 hardback, $ 16.50, ISBN 1‐85973‐156‐2 paperback.

David I. Kertzer (1996) Politics and Symbols. The Italian Communist Party and the Fall of Communism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press), pp. 1‐224, $25, ISBN 0‐300‐06612‐0 hardback.

Pier Paolo Giglioli, Sandra Cavicchioli and Giolo Fele ( 1997) Rituali di degradazione: Anatomia del processo Cusani (Bologna: II Mulino), pp. 1‐243,28,000 lire, ISBN 88‐15‐05713‐7.

Mario Baldassarri and Franco Modigliani (eds) (1995) The Italian Economy. What Next? (New York: St Martin's Press), pp. 1‐200, $69.95, ISBN 0‐312‐12475‐9 hardback.

Piergiorgio Corbetta and Arturo M. L. Parisi (eds) (1997) Cavalieri e fanti: Proposte e proponenti nelle elezioni del 1994 e del 1996 (Bologna: Il Mulino), pp. 1‐421; Piergiorgio Corbetta and Arturo M. L Parisi (eds) (1997) A domanda risponde: Il cambiamento nel voto degli italiani nelle elezioni del 1994 e del 1996 (Bologna: Il Mulino), pp. 1‐410.