Mila Milani

Introduction: rupture and continuity in the Italian literary field 1926-1960

This special issue of Italian Studies, entitled Continuity and Rupture in the Italian Literary Field 1926– 1960, is the third of a series of guest-edited volumes addressing the role played by periodicals in Italian twentieth-century literary culture. Like its predecessors, this volume too is the result of the research carried out as part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project Mapping Literary Space: Literary Journals, Publishing Firms, Intellectuals in Italy 1940–1960 (2012–2015).1 Similarly, this issue continues the discussion on how periodicals react and adapt to political and institutional pressures, by selecting and orienting aesthetic, political, and cultural interventions into topical debates of the day. It does so by contributing rigorous archive-based explorations of key journals, which shaped the Italian literary discourse in the years under scrutiny. Thus the volume intends to re-evaluate journals which, emerging from localised literary milieux, contributed to nurturing literary talents, to shaping the debate on disinterestedness and the autonomy of the arts from the field of power, and – with various degrees of success – to engaging with foreign literatures and transnational exchanges of ideas. Taken as a whole, the articles here collected explicitly engage with the journal’s action in local, national, and international cultural networks, from Solaria’s inception in 1926 to the demise of Botteghe Oscure in 1960. In this sense, the chronological spectrum of this guest-edited issue ensures that, for instance, we can identify the main phases of the development of a disinterested, and seemingly apolitical, approach to the role of the arts, cutting across Solaria, Letteratura, and Botteghe Oscure, linking together Florence, Rome and the various foreign republics of letters with which these journals dialogued over the years. However, a rigorous discussion of the factors that contributed to the emergence and consolidation of the discourse of disinterestedness during the Fascist regime and in the early Republican years must take into account the rise of competing narratives and intellectual forces that voiced an increasing discomfort with this posture and, therefore, elaborated an alternative ideologically inflected model of cultural intervention. The Florentine literary field in the years under scrutiny is a test case for the interaction of these evolving, competing paradigms. Given its exemplarity, several of the contributions in this volume refer to literary experiences which originated in Florence, and from this city made substantial contributions to the national literary discourse. The contributions gathered in this special issue do not claim to offer a comprehensive account of periodical culture in Italy but present a number of case studies to illustrate how networks, institutions, and individuals interact behind the journal’s printed page and how these interactions shape the journal’s message.This special issue gathers together articles which explicitly engage with the journal’s action in local, national, and international cultural networks, from Solaria’s inception in 1926 to the demise of Botteghe Oscure in 1960. The chronological spectrum of this guest-edited issue ensures that, for instance, we can identify the main phases of the development of a disinterested, and seemingly apolitical, approach to the role of the arts, cutting across Solaria, Letteratura, and Botteghe Oscure, linking together Florence, Rome and the various foreign republics of letters with which these journals dialogued over the years

Carlo Salinari, the PCI, and transnational exchanges in Il Contemporaneo (1954–1955)

Abstract This article investigates from a hitherto neglected transnational angle the cultural strategies developed in the Italian Communist Party (PCI)’s literary journal Il Contemporaneo by the editor-in-chief Carlo Salinari in the years 1954 and 1955. In the form of editorial notes, foreign contributions and reviews of foreign literature, Salinari aimed at establishing an intellectual dialogue which would reach across national borders. Analysing the contributions published in the journal, the article explores the extent to which this transnational exchange related with the Gramscian ‘national-popular’ stance and helped to legitimate the journal within the Italian cultural field.

The role of translation in the history of publishing: Publishers and contemporary poetry translation in 1960s Italy

ABSTRACT This article illuminates the role that translation can play in the study of the history of publishing and culture. It analyses Einaudi’s strategies for publishing contemporary foreign poetry in 1960s Italy. Interpreting unpublished archival data from a Bourdieusian perspective, the article reassesses the role played by Einaudi in the political and poetic movements of the day, arguing that poetry translation was instrumental in modifying the publishing, literary and political field, and in redefining, transnationally, the intellectual identity of the Einaudi editors. The study of the history of publishing from the perspective of translation, in conjunction with a sociological methodology, not only discloses the position taken by the Italian publisher within the field, but ultimately provides an alternative historical account of how culture was shaped in post-Second World War Italy.