Unity and/or Disunity in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Poetry: Proto-Aestheticism, Cultural Politics, and Italian Nationalism at the Victorian Mid-Century

Revisiting the issue of Rossetti's response to politics, I argue that Rossetti's early work on Italian topics should be placed within the Risorgimento tradition of cultural nationalism that preceded and then ran alongside the political movement for Italian unification. Recent work by scholars such as Christopher Kierstead, Stefano Evangelisto, and Matthew Potolsky on cosmopolitan political discourse within Aestheticism and Decadence has shown that the age of ‘Art for Art's Sake’ does not turn away from politics, but rather re-defines its parameters. By re-situating Rossetti's writing on Italy in relation to issues of cultural nationalism I argue that his work can be regarded as a formative precursor to the development of this cosmopolitan aesthetic. I show how Rossetti's poetics on the topic of Italian unity returns a repeated experience of separateness – a failure of resolution defined politically, epistemologically, and aesthetically. Through exploring and analysing this episteme of separateness in his Italianate works and as an aesthetic principle that recurs throughout Poems (1870), I argue that Rossetti creates an alternate aesthetic of disunity which engages creatively with the modernity of the mid-century and creates the necessary preconditions for the subsequent phenomenon of Decadent cosmopolitanism to emerge. Rossetti's writing on Italy refutes most of the conventions of the tradition of cultural-nationalist writing but it is nevertheless embedded within it: I argue that an embedded reading of this Italian theme in his works is necessary to an understanding of the extent and character of Rossetti's poetic innovations of the mid-century.

Nacjonalizm włoski — pomiędzy nacjonalitaryzmem a nacjonalfaszyzmem

ITALIAN NATIONALISM: BETWEEN NATIONALITARIANISM AND NATIONAL-FASCISMThe subject of this article is the doctrine of Italian nationalism considered using the approach of the Polish italianist Joanna Sondel-Cedarmas. This doctrine found its most complete expression in the activity and journalism of Italian Nationalist Association Associazione Nazionalista Italiana; ANI, of which the main theorists and leaders were Enrico Corradini, Luigi Federzoni, Alfredo Rocco and Francesco Coppola. Although the organization was active relatively briefly, that is, for 13 years from 1910 to 1923, it played a key role in the transitional period between the parliamentary system and the fascist dictatorship. The historical role of ANI consisted in breaking with the nationalitarian ideology dominating in nineteenth-century Italy and related to the Risorgimento Rising Again movement, which was liberal, democratic and anti-clerical. Instead, ANI adopted integral nationalism, connected with right-wing, conservative, monarchist, anti-liberal and authoritarian ideology and favourable to the Catholic religion. However, in contrast to countries like France, Spain, Portugal or Poland, nationalism of this kind failed to retain its autonomous political position and organisational separation, because after World War I it encountered a strong competitor in the anti-liberal camp — fascism, which as a plebeian and revolutionary movement found a broader support base in the pauperised and anarchy-affected society. Nationalists, forced to cooperate with the National Fascist Party after the March on Rome and the coming to power of Benito Mussolini, modified their doctrine in the spirit of the national-fascist ideology. In spite of that, the nationalists active within the fascist system were preventing that system from evolving towards totalitarianism and defended the monarchy, as well as the independence of the Roman-Catholic Church.

Erecting fascism: Nation, identity, and space in Trieste in the first half of the twentieth century

This article discusses the transformation of the urban space after World War I in the former Habsburg port city of Trieste. It reveals the key role played by the newly annexed northeastern Adriatic borderland in the national symbolism of postwar Italy, and it indicates how slogans and notions of Italian nationalism, irredentism, and fascism intertwined and became embodied in the local cultural landscape. The analysis is mostly concentrated on the era between the two world wars, but the aim of the article is to interpret the interwar years as part of longer term historical developments in the region rather than a break in its history. Looking at how monuments, buildings, and spatial planning in general functioned as ideological and national marking, and how this helped to shape the nation in a multi-ethnic town, this article seeks to contribute to a better understanding of changes as well as continuities in the modern history of south-central Europe. It argues that even if the cityscape had undergone drastic changes in its aesthetics after World War I, its ideological language was rooted in prewar nationalism and continued to support the local urban palimpsest in the Cold War.

The Bounds of Empire

Scholars have long believed that ‘medieval’ universalism was supplanted by ‘Italian’ nationalism over the course of the fourteenth century. As this chapter demonstrates, however, nothing could be further from the truth. Although the humanists were often more concerned with the fate of Italy, or of individual cities, than of mankind as a whole, they did not waver in their belief that the Holy Roman Empire enjoyed universal dominion. Only at the very end of the Visconti Wars, when the Empire was seen to threaten the peace and liberty of the peninsula did ‘Italianness’ at last begin to come to the fore. Yet this is not to say that their universalism was unvarying. Depending on whether they chose to view it more as the successor of the ancient imperium Romanum or as an instrument of providence, they could paint it in idealistically ‘Roman’ colours, or endow it with a more ‘hegemonic’ tinge.

Religion as Resistance

During the Italian occupation of Libya, debates over where Italy should be on the continuum between coercion and collaboration in colonial rule often reflected contentious battles over religious identity in Italian nationalism. These tensions came into sharpest relief in the Italian attempts to develop a power-sharing relationship with elite members of the Muslim Sufi order, the Sanusiyya in eastern Libya. Perceptions of the Sanusiyya as religious fundamentalists suggested to some the utility of emphasizing a shared sense of religious conservatism to “sell” Italian colonial rule. Others, however, argued that only a secular identity in colonial rule would prevent Muslim opposition to Italian occupation. Descriptions of the Sanusiyya in Italian sources therefore reflected their authors’ conflicting interests in projecting a Catholic or secular identity in Italian expansion. Adherents of the Sanusiyya were likewise divided in their responses to Italian colonial rule. In the early stages of the Italian occupation, Sanusi elites recognized the utility of negotiating a position of political authority in relationship to the Italian colonial state. As the fascist regime pushed colonial rule further toward coercion than collaboration (and embraced a Catholic identity in the process) in the 1920s, some Sanusi factions redefined the Sufi order as a force of anticolonial opposition and a nascent nationalist movement. This book explores the shifting relationship between religious and national identity through the process of negotiating colonial rule among both Italian imperialists and Sanusi elites.

Catherine of Siena

Catherine of Siena (b. 1347–d. 1380) was an author, spiritual leader, religious reformer, and one of the more remarkable public figures of the Middle Ages. Born to a prosperous family of cloth dyers, in her youth she developed a reputation for unusual piety, and in her late teens or early twenties joined the local community of Dominican female penitents (precursors to what became in the 15th century the Dominican Third Order). She developed a following that included a number of young Sienese nobleman, as well as religious from various orders, and in 1374 was enlisted by the Dominican order and the papacy to help advance several causes, including a Crusade to the Holy Land and peace in Italy. Between 1374 and her death in 1380, through her letters and in person, Catherine advocated for ecclesiastical reform, the return of the papacy to Rome from Avignon, and the Roman observance after the schism of 1378. In addition to her letters—the largest epistolary collection by a woman in the Middle Ages—she is known for a masterpiece of mystical theology, her Libro di divvina dottrina (Book of Divine Teachings), better known today as the Dialogo, a synthesis of her spiritual insights, structured in the form of a dialogue between Catherine and God. It was largely through her Libro, in addition to the hagiographical tradition, that her reputation spread throughout Europe. Catherine became the object of an active cult before her canonization in 1461, and she was embraced in the early modern period as a mystic and model for female monasticism. In the period of Italian nationalism from the Risorgimento through World War II, she became an emblem of Catholic Italy, and more recently she has been valued more for her active engagement with the world as well as for her spiritual writings. Scholars of Catherine of Siena and her devotees—two not-mutually exclusive groups—have over time vacillated radically in their sense of Catherine’s association with Italian politics and society, and in their assessments of her writings and their place in literary culture. Until recently, she has not been taken seriously by Italian literary critical scholarship: the inspired, devotional character of her prose, and its mix of oral with literary characteristics, has seemed to place her outside of literature, properly speaking. But there is currently a renewed interest in Catherine as an author, as well as a return to questions regarding the complexities of her texts and their composition first raised in the initial flowering of Catherinian source criticism in the 1930s and 1940s. She emerged as an important figure in international medieval scholarship with the rise of interest in hagiography, lay spirituality, and women’s religion and gendered religiosity in the last quarter of the 20th century, and is now recognized by historians as a key representative of important trends in late-medieval religion.

“Buy Italian!”

This chapter examines how the fondness of New York City's Italian immigrants for imported foods helped make the food import business crucial to the project of diasporic Italian nationalism. It argues that the Italian state, especially the fascist regime after 1922, and its representatives in New York supported the business of importing food in order to expand the country's economic and political influence in the United States. The chapter first provides an overview of New York's food imports from Italy during the period 1890–1920, along with the food import crisis and the Italian Chamber of Commerce's “Buy Italian!” campaign of 1935–1936. It then considers how food frauds, imitations, and canned symbols sparked a feud between Italian food importers, on the one side, and domestic Italian food producers and grossieri, on the other. It also explains how supplying immigrants with “authentic” Italian food helped strengthen relations between Italy and America and created a tangible economic dimension that complemented ideological and emotional diasporic nationalism.