This book argues that Italy represents a privileged entry point into the comparative analysis of ideologies and experiences of modernity. The book compares how thinkers and politicians belonging to different ideological clusters - Liberalism, Communism, Fascism, Chistian Democracy - came to formulate multiple and often antagonistic visions of Italy's road to the modern. By revisiting Italian political history from the late nineteenth century until the present with a focus on transition periods, Italian Modernities explores how competing historical narratives influenced shifting understandings of Italian nationhood, thus foregrounding the active role of memory politics in the formulation of multiple modernities.

Autorentext

Rosario Forlenza is a Research Fellow at the European Institute, Columbia University, USA and a MarieCurie Fellow at the University of Padova, Italy. He is a historian of modernEurope and twentieth century Italy, whose research is located at theintersection of history, politics and anthropology. He has published two booksand several articles in journals such as History Workshop Journal, ContemporaryEuropean History, and Journal of Cold War Studies.

Bjørn Thomassen is an Associate Professor at theDepartment of Society and Globalisation, Roskilde University, Denmark. His workspans across the social sciences with a focus on urban studies, globalisation,nationalism, memory politics in Italy, Europe and globally. Recent books are BreakingBoundaries. Varieties of Liminality (ed. Berghahn 2015), Liminality andthe Modern: Living through the In-Between (Ashgate 2014), Global Rome:Changing Faces of the Eternal City (2014). **

Inhalt

.-Chapter 1 Into Italy, into the Modern.-

.Chapter 2 Liberal Modernity.-

.Chapter 3 Catholic Modernities. Epics of a Christian Nation.-

.Chapter 4 Gramsci and the Italian Road to Socialist Modernity.-

.Chapter 5 Fascist modernity.-

.Chapter 6 Frictions of Modernity: World War II as a Historical Juncture.-

.Chapter 7 Competing Modernities: Postwar Italy and the Struggle Over a Divided Past.-

.Chapter 8 Fragile Modernities: Critique, Crisis and Emancipatory Politics.-

.Chapter 9 After Modernity? Nationhood in the Post-Cold War era.-

.Chapter 10 - Conclusion What if we were never modern?.-