The Legacy of the Italian Resistance

In this rich and detailed interdisciplinary study, Philip Cooke explores the enduring and contested legacy of the Italian Resistance movement. This book scrutinizes the ambivalent and shifting attitudes toward the movement held by the major Italian political parties and the State, caught up as they were in an ambitious project to build a new nation out of the ruins of Fascism and the Second World War. Using a wide array of texts, Cooke bridges the gap between historical and cultural studies and shows how Italian politics, history, and culture have interacted over the long term. Fusing historical and cultural analysis, this is a unique contribution to our understanding of modern Italy.

“The legacy of the Resistance runs like a seam beneath the surface of the entire history of postwar Italian politics and culture. Philip Cooke’s book does a remarkable service to both scholarly and civic communities by drawing together a mass of information, events, artefacts, works, and ‘vectors’ in the public uses of this difficult history. He questions stereotypes, such as the Communist ‘hegemony’ over memory, brings together top-down and from-below methods and materials, and steers a lucid, forceful path through this most contested of territories. The book will become a necessary reference point for anyone thinking about the Resistance and about modern Italy.”--Robert S. C. Gordon, Reader in Modern Italian Culture, University of Cambridge

“This book is a comprehensive analysis of the legacy of the Italian anti-fascist resistance. Its great strength lies in the fact that it covers the whole period from 1945 to the present day through the detailed study of a whole series of ‘texts’--novels, films, documentaries, trials, newspapers, history books, diaries, monuments, paintings, museums and so on. This breadth of analysis makes this book both original and extremely useful for those studying and researching into post-war Italy, post-war Europe, and debates over memory.”--John Foot, Professor of Modern Italian History, University College London

“Philip Cooke’s book traces the complex history of the Resistance legacy from the end of the war to the present day. He offers his readers a detailed and refined analysis of a wide range of texts from works of history, to films, novels, short stories, monuments, political speeches, as well as fiction for children. This is a fascinating and lucidly written book which makes an important contribution to our understanding of the ‘public use of history’ in Italy.”--Paolo Pezzino, Professor, Department of History, University of Pisa

“Cooke builds on the most recent scholarship on the Resistance to provide a fascinating account of how its legacy has been contested in political, social, and cultural debates going back over half a century and coming up to the age of Berlusconi. The volume combines narrative readability with scholarly accuracy and insight, and is aimed as much at the political as the cultural historian. It constitutes the first systematic attempt in English to chart the overall significance of the Resistance legacy in Italy from the late 1940s to today.”--Martin McLaughlin, Professor, Fiat-Serena Professor of Italian, University of Oxford

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