Resisting the Tide

Edited by members of the Department of Italian Studies at the University of Birmingham, and bringing together academics in Britain, Ireland, the US and Italy, this volume takes an international perspective on Italian events. It investigates how resistance to the new conservative culture has been articulated, and how this has been expressed and explained by those involved. The volume is divided into four areas: 1. The Economic and Media Landscapes, which sets the scene for the rest of the book by explaining how Italian society, and particularly its media environment, have developed in recent years; 2. Political Challenges, which discusses the main threats to the authority and policies of Berlusconi coming from within his own centre-right coalition, the left and social movements; 3. Texts, which analyses films, internet sites, television programmes, novels, newspaper articles and theatre performances that sought to resist increasingly dominant conservative norms and/or respond to events set in motion by the Berlusconi governments; 4.Experiences, covering the voices and practices of those who have opposed Berlusconi from within the cultural industries and identity movements, such as journalists, LGBT activists, feminists and associations representing immigrant communities. Wide-ranging, innovative and challenging, this volume should appeal to all those who have an interest in Italy, political-, media- and cultural studies.

Clodagh Brook is Senior Lecturer and Head of the Department of Italian Studies at the University of Birmingham. She is currently preparing a monograph for publication on the Italian film director Marco Bellocchio (Marco Bellocchio: Individualism and Anarchy) and has written widely on contemporary Italian cinema as well as on twentieth-century literature (The Expression of the Inexpressible in Eugenio Montale's Poetry). Editor (with R. Bertoni and C. Veronese) of the twentieth-century Italian section of The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies. Charlotte Ross is Lecturer in the Department of Italian Studies, University of Birmingham. She is co-editor, with Loredana Polezzi, of In Corpore: Bodies in Post-Unification Italy, and has published on gender, sexuality, identity and embodiment in Italian culture and cultural texts. She is currently preparing a monograph entitled Primo Levi: Containing the Human. Nina Rothenberg teaches Sociology at the American University of Rome and is Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham. She has published articles on Euroscepticism in the British Press and on the women's press in post-war Italy. Her main research interests lie in the field of media, immigration, and gender. She is currently working on a book manuscript on media and gender in post-war Italy. Daniele Albertazzi is Senior Lecturer in European Media (Department of Italian Studies, University of Birmingham). He is the editor (with Duncan McDonnell) of Twenty-first Century Populism - The Spectre of Western European Democracy. Daniele is currently editing (with Paul Cobley) The Media, An Introduction - Third Ed. and researching a monograph (with Duncan McDonnell) on Regionalist vs. Nationalist Populists in Power: Actions and Reactions.