Lo sguardo sul mondo della 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. It has a very eclectic setting. It gives place to different tendencies. It offers 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, starting at that time its cultural politics. This was based on the role that intellectuals could play as creators and diffusers of a popular Italian culture, both at home and abroad, through journal, 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 involved the problem of the relationship between the Italian and the world culture, a huge topic that fell fully within the perimeter beaten by the "Fiera", which was very attentive to various foreign cultures, particularly to literature.