Geographies and Histories of World Literature in Interwar Italian Magazines

Abstract

This article adopts a historiographical approach to analyse some key debates on world literature that played out in literary and cultural magazines during the Italian Fascist dictatorship. It shows that by hosting such debates – especially on realism – in seemingly random fashion, literary and cultural magazines in the 1920s and 1930s significantly contributed to problematise the cultural politics of a xenophobic regime regarding the arts in general, and literature in particular. To this end, I focus on journals of different sizes, political orientations and visibility to provide different theorisations of world literature. Finally, by discussing the multiple epitomes of world literature that the magazines created, I question the presence of what may be considered a coherent national, or even canonical, literature to argue that world and national literatures could co-exist when made to function not just as literary but also as a cultural mechanism.