Broken time, fragmented space

"Broken Time, Fragmented Space: A Cultural Map for Postwar Italy examines how the artists and intellectuals of postwar Italy dealt with the painful heritage of their Fascist upbringing and education by trying to craft a new cultural identity for themselves and the country. The continuities between the Fascist and post-Fascist periods were, however, far greater than intellectuals were ready to admit, and this situation created a distant, sometimes detached, attitude to time, as an attempt to erase the past.". "Drawing on a variety of critical approaches, Anna Maria Torriglia investigates postwar efforts to reconstruct personal as well as collective identity in this analysis of both canonical and lesser-known cinematic and literary texts. Organized around four main themes - the use of language, the interaction between personal and public spheres, the perceptual categories history and memory, and the reconstruction of the female identity - the study also includes historical background and sociological commentary that provide a broad and captivating picture of the cultural production in 1950s Italy, a period that has not yet been extensively studied."--BOOK JACKET.