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Podcast: New Books in Italian Studies
Episode: Charles L. Leavitt IV, "Italian Neorealism: A Cultural History" (U Toronto Press, 2020)
Description: In Italian Neorealism: A Cultural History (University of Toronto Press, 2020), Charles Leavitt steps back from the micro-histories focusing more narrowly on, for example, Italian cinema so as to weave together divers cultural strands (literature, the visual arts, drama, journalism, poetry, essays) into a tapestry of historical practice. Which realisms are being invoked under the category of “Neorealism” as it was plied and applied in the mid-20th Century? What were the aims of these realisms? What did they accomplish? Each of Italian Neorealism’s four chapters sketches answers to these questions by approaching a corpus that interweaves some very well-known...