L’Italia e il mondo nella "Fiera Letteraria".

Letteratura, arte e fascismo agli esordi della dittatura

Abstract

La Fiera Letteraria is one of the most popular literary journals of the fascist era. It is not addressed to specialists or professional readers but has a very eclectic setting and gives place to different tendencies, offering a wide and various limelight of the literary landscape. La Fiera tends to inform more than to form, to represent rather than elaborate: it is mainly a gazette, a chronicle of what moves and happens in the literary world, reflecting all different positions. This paper investigates the link between La Fiera and the fascist regime, which started at that time its cultural politics. These were based on the role that intellectuals could play as creators and diffusers of a popular Italian culture, both at home and abroad, through journals, conferences, expositions, and all sorts of cultural events. This policy was driven by a dual mission: the internal conquest (the creation of a new ‘fascist Italian’); the external conquest, also called ‘spiritual imperialism’ (the use of myths and ideas, disseminated abroad, to promote Italian cultural identity, interests, influence, and hegemony). This dual mission involved the problem of the relationship between the Italian and global culture, a huge topic that fell fully within the perimeter beaten by La Fiera, which was very attentive to various foreign cultures, and particularly to their literary landscape.