The Last Forty Years of Italian Popular Culture

“Andare al Popolo”

Edited By: Enrico Minardi, Paolo Desogus

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This volume offers an insight into recent Italian pop culture. Essays on topics from literature and music to comics and politics reveal a country where mass participation in cultural events accompanies reflection on national identity. An engaging and indispensable read.

What is Italian pop culture? This volume provides an answer to this question, offering an insight into some of the most recent and interesting developments…

What is Italian pop culture? This volume provides an answer to this question, offering an insight into some of the most recent and interesting developments in the field of pop culture. The reader will find essays on a variety of topics including literature, theater, music, social media, comics, politics, and even Christmas. Each contribution here places stress on the popular. The main reference points guiding the chapters are, in fact, the pioneering works by Antonio Gramsci and Umberto Eco. The result is, therefore, a portrait of a country where mass participation in cultural events always accompanies some form of reflection on the national identity and other related issues. Historians and sociologists, as well as musicologists and philosophers (in addition to pop culture aficionados), will find the text an engaging and indispensable read.

Enrico Minardi is Senior Lecturer in Italian and French at Arizona State University, USA. He has published a number of books and articles on Italian literature and female crime fiction. He translated (with T. Corse) a collection of poetry by Ferruccio Benzoni, and is curator of the twentieth century poetry section for The Year’s Work in Modern Language Studies.

Paolo Desogus is Associate Professor in Italian Literature and Cinema at Sorbonne Université, France. He has authored La confusion des langues. Autour du discours indirect dans l’œuvre de Pier Paolo Pasolini, (2018) and Laboratorio Pasolini. Teoria del segno e del cinema (2018). He is also the co-editor of Il presente di Gramsci. Letteratura e ideologia oggi (with M. Cangiano, M. Gatto, and L. Mari, 2018). In 2015, he was awarded the “Pier Paolo Pasolini Prize”.