{"id":513,"date":"2016-04-15T19:33:13","date_gmt":"2016-04-15T19:33:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/press\/?p=513"},"modified":"2025-08-14T17:25:42","modified_gmt":"2025-08-14T17:25:42","slug":"fascist-directive-ezra-pound-and-italian-cultural-nationalism","status":"publish","type":"books","link":"https:\/\/libraries.clemson.edu\/press\/books\/fascist-directive-ezra-pound-and-italian-cultural-nationalism\/","title":{"rendered":"Fascist Directive"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In 1938, American poet Ezra Pound published <em>Guide to Kulchur<\/em>, a book so radically different from his earlier writing that readers might not have believed that it was written by the same firebrand aesthetician who had advocated in 1913 that poets go in fear of abstractions. But <em>Guide to Kulchur<\/em> was only the latest example of a new kind of prose that Pound had been writing\u2014fiercely invested in politics and the mobilization of cultural heritage to its service. Pound\u2019s new modernism came as a direct effect of his investment in fascism. Since the last monographic treatment of Pound\u2019s fascism, scholars of literature, history, art history, urban design, and music have uncovered important aspects of the fascist regime\u2019s use of culture to foment Italian national identity. These studies reveal the cultural, mythical, rhetorical, and intellectual aspects of that regime\u2014more than enough new knowledge to require a reappraisal of perhaps the most famous, certainly the most notorious, American in Italy in that era, and perhaps the entire twentieth century. Unlike previous discussions of Pound\u2019s adoption of Italian fascism, which focus mostly on his political and economic interests, this book reveals the importance of the cultural projects of Mussolini\u2019s fascist regime. By bringing Italian primary sources and new approaches to the cultural project of Mussolini\u2019s regime to bear on Pound\u2019s prose work (including unpublished material from the Pound Papers and untranslated periodical contributions), Paul shows how Pound\u2019s modernism changed as a result of involvement in Italian politics and culture. At the same time, it uses the familiar figure of Pound to provide an entry for scholars of Anglo-American modernism into the diverse and complex realm of Italian modernism.<\/p>\n<p><strong>*** Winner of the Ezra Pound Society Book Award ***<\/strong><\/p>","protected":false},"featured_media":2987,"template":"","subject":[36,37,38],"browse_by_series":[33],"browse_by_imprints":[],"conference":[],"class_list":["post-513","books","type-books","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","subject-literature","subject-modernism","subject-music","browse_by_series-ezra-pound-center-for-literature"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraries.clemson.edu\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/books\/513","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraries.clemson.edu\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/books"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraries.clemson.edu\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/books"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.clemson.edu\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/books\/513\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5510,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.clemson.edu\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/books\/513\/revisions\/5510"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.clemson.edu\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2987"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraries.clemson.edu\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"subject","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.clemson.edu\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/subject?post=513"},{"taxonomy":"browse_by_series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.clemson.edu\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/browse_by_series?post=513"},{"taxonomy":"browse_by_imprints","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.clemson.edu\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/browse_by_imprints?post=513"},{"taxonomy":"conference","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.clemson.edu\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/conference?post=513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}