Architecture and the novel under the italian fascist regime

Abstract

This book forms part of a wider research project entitled, Modernism, Modernization, and the Arts under European Dictatorships, funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Drawing on a wide-ranging set of modernist journals and artefacts—spanning public building, films, theatre plays, artworks and novels—this research project explored how the Italian Fascist regime’s participation in an aesthetic movement (modernism) and in its transformation into a social phenomenon (modernization) created a distinctive system of the arts, which, in the 1930s, also had a profound influence across the whole of Europe. Specifically, this book analyses the relationship between the novel and architecture as one of the key expressions of the system of the arts under the dictatorship.