The Visionary Memory of Literature: Collective Identity as an Imagined Community in Contemporary Italian Historical Fiction

Title

The Visionary Memory of Literature: Collective Identity as an Imagined Community in Contemporary Italian Historical Fiction

Author

Jürgen STRAUB & Gala REBANE

Page

71-99

DOI

Abstract

This paper makes an inquiry into the ways in which various social, cultural and political groups in the present-day Italy create, express and recast their historical self-image in the medium of belles-lettres. In the conflict-ridden Italy of the last 30 years, historical fiction has been actively generating a complexly structured historical consciousness oscillating between nostalgic reconstructions of the collective past on the one hand, and its future-oriented retroception, on the other. The insights into the socio-political function of belles-lettres offered therein are discussed within a larger framework of the present-day sociopsychological and cultural theory with a particular focus on the respective roles of normative prescription and reconstructive postscription in the processes of identity construction and politics.

Keyword

Memory, Collective Identity, Fiction, Italy, History, Historical Consciousness, Identity Politics

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