Trading Rationality for Tomatoes: The Consolidation of Anglo-American National Identities in Popular Literary Representations of Italian Culture

• Authors: Pierini Francesca
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

In The Rhetoric of Empire (1993), David Spurr analyzes journalistic discourse on the Third World and isolates a nucleus of rhetorical figures around which representations of the colonial and post-colonial other are articulated. In this paper, I will borrow, in particular, three of these rhetorical figures (naturalization, idealization, appropriation) and I will adapt them to the context of contemporary Anglo-American representations of Italian culture in popular literature. I will argue that a substantial number of contemporary works on Italy retains the basic assumption of a world ordered around a dichotomy between modern cultures and pre-modern ones, and makes of this taxonomy the basic spatiotemporal context for its narratives.

Keywords

EN

postcolonial theory; Italian culture; Anglo-American popular literature; Orientalism; colonial discourse

• Publisher: Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw
• Journal: Anglica. An International Journal of English Studies
• Year: 2016
• Issue: 25/1
• Pages: 181-197

Contributors

author

Pierini Francesca

• University of Leuven

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