National dialogues and transnational exchanges across Italian periodical culture, 1940–1960

Abstract

, we discuss those broad issues concerning cultural exchanges as they developed in the Italian context. The six articles here collected address both the transnational dialogue between intellectuals inspired and maintained through the periodical press between 1940 and the late 1950s, and how periodicals engaged nationally with the cultural challenges posed by the reconstruction and the post-1948 cultural politics of the Republic. As in other European countries, if, in Italy, the urgency for cultural reconfiguration was felt after geopolitical crises of the magnitude of the end of the Second World War and the 1956 Hungarian crisis, the periodical press also had to respond to nationally-specific political concerns, such as the establishment of a new state system after the fall of the Fascist regime, the negotiations with consolidated superpowers (U.S.A. and the Soviet Union), and the 1948 elections, which significantly determined the future polarisations within the political arena. By looking at the interconnections amongst several journals, we argue that from 1940 to 1960 Italian periodicals played a significant role in reflecting, activating and developing central debates around leadership and the new core values of intellectual communication, which had the specific function of transgressing boundaries between aesthetic practices and political praxis. Such boundaries marked a set of cultural and ideological propositionsranging from Crocianesimo to realism and dialectical Marxismwhich Italian intellectuals and writers felt had to be renegotiated by creating fresh interpretative synergies and cross-cultural pathways. Thus in this special issue we demonstrate the vital role played by Italian journals in producing national and transnational discourses, which were fundamental in the consolidation of postwar Italian culture. This edited collection follows an established and ongoing trend in periodical studies in so far as it looks at periodicals as culturally embodied agents of transformation (Binckes 2010; Rogers 2012; Thacker-Brooker 2013). However, it challenges recent work, which either neglects to account for the diverse intellectual forces engaged in the genesis of a periodical or places excessive emphasis on typologies which tend to neglect the intrinsic peculiarities and nuances of any cultural object both from a national or a transnational perspective (Lathan-Scholes 2006). Our work aligns

Handbuch Zeitschriftenforschung

“…Die Übersetzung war also Aufarbeitung, Reflexion und Erneuerung zugleich. Periodika fungierten als Scharnierstellen zwischen Vorkriegsvergangenheit und Zukunft und initiierten einen »Prozess des Aushandelns« (Lampart 2013: 205), der sich mit der Funktion literarischer und kulturpolitischer Texte innerhalb unterschiedlicher kultureller Systeme und Netzwerke kritisch auseinandersetzte (Billiani/La Penna 2016;Sullam 2016). Inwiefern fungierten übersetzte Texte als kreative Kräfte zum Aufbau neuer europäischer Identitäten?…”