Search results for ""Author Stephen Gundle""
Duke University Press Between Hollywood and Moscow: The Italian Communists and the Challenge of Mass Culture, 1943–1991
In the postwar years, Italy underwent a far-reaching process of industrialization that transformed the country into a leading industrial power. Throughout most of this period, the Italian Communist Party (PCI) remained a powerful force in local government and civil society. However, as Stephen Gundle observes, the PCI was increasingly faced with challenges posed by modernization, particularly by mass communication, commercial cultural industries, and consumerism. Between Hollywood and Moscow is an analysis of the PCI’s attempts to cope with these problems in an effort to maintain its organization and subculture.Gundle focuses on the theme of cultural policy, examining how the PCI’s political strategies incorporated cultural policies and activities that were intended to respond to the Americanization of daily life in Italy. In formulating this policy, Gundle contends, the Italian Communists were torn between loyalty to the alternative values generated by the Communist tradition and adaptation to the dominant influences of Italian modernization. This equilibrium eventually faltered because the attractive aspects of Americanization and pop culture proved more influential than the PCI’s intellectual and political traditions. The first analysis in English of the cultural policies and activities of the PCI, this book will appeal to readers with an interest in modern Italy, the European left, political science, and media studies.
£23.99
Canongate Books Death and the Dolce Vita: The Dark Side of Rome in the 1950s
On 9 April 1953 an attractive twenty-one-year-old woman went missing from her family home in Rome. Thirty-six hours later her body was found washed up on a neglected beach. Some said it was suicide; others, a tragic accident. But as the police tried to close the case, darker rumours bubbled to the surface. Could it be that the mysterious death of this quiet, conservative girl was linked to a drug-fuelled orgy, involving some of the richest and most powerful men in Italy?
£12.99
Indiana University Press Mass Culture and Italian Society from Fascism to the Cold War
The 1930s to the 1950s in Italy witnessed large increases in film-going, radio-listening, and the sale of music and weekly magazines. The industries that made and sold commercial, cultural products were transformed by the new technologies of reproduction and new approaches to marketing and distribution.Yet historians tend to place the "real" genesis of mass culture in the 1960s, or to generalize about the harnessing of mass culture to the Fascist political project, without considering what kind of mass culture existed at the time and whether this harnessing was successful. This book draws on extensive new evidence, including oral histories and archival material, to explore possible continuities between the uses of mass culture before and after World War II.
£21.99
£36.79
