The Success of US Literature in Italy During Fascism

Ambivalent Censorship, Market, and Consensus

Abstract

This essay explores the manifold and intermixed ways through which fascist censorship dealt with one of the most remunerative yet problematic literary fields on the Italian book market: US literature. In particular, the purpose here is to demonstrate that the permissiveness that characterizes the fascist management of US literature unveils a subtle and sly attempt to manipulate US books to make them compatible with the fascist national ideology, conversely lightening their subversive and critical potential towards Italy. The article is structured in two parts: the first examines the ambivalent perception of the US in Italy during fascism and its correlation to the national circulation of US literature. By resorting to some significant episodes of book censorship in the translations of Elio Vittorini, Cesare Pavese, and Eugenio Montale, the second part demonstrates how the authorities’ interventions on US books can be interpreted as attempts to adapt US culture and literature to respond to the urgencies of Mussolini’s regime. In particular, the censorial interference dictated the elimination of references to Italy to prevent the Italian readers’ exposure to critical perspectives on the country that could excoriate the national image that fascism was struggling to build. The two sections intersect a quantitative overview of the circulation of US books in Italy and a qualitative analysis of how censorship evaluated books and induced their manipulation via translation.