Jennifer Burns

Ayn Rand and the American Right

Goddess of the market

Examining five central figures and concepts - identity, memory, home, place and space, and literature - across a range of novels and stories by writers of African and Middle Eastern origin, this book elucidates the affective and expressive processes that inflect migrant story-telling in Italy.

Figures in Italian Migration Literature

Migrant Imaginaries

Derek Duncan

An Open Access edition of this book will be available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. In a world increasingly defined by the transnational and translingual, and by the pressures of globalization, it has become difficult to study culture as primarily a national phenomenon. A Handbook offers students across Modern Languages an introduction to the kind of methodological questions they need to look at culture transnationally. Each of the short essays takes a key concept in cultural study and suggests how it might be used to explore and illuminate some aspect of identity, mobility, translation, and cultural exchange across borders. The authors range over different language areas and their wide chronological reach provides broad coverage, as well as a flexible and practical methodology for studying cultures in a transnational framework. The essays show that an inclusive, transnational vision and practice of Modern Languages is central to understanding human interaction in an inclusive, globalized society. A Handbook stands as an effective and necessary theoretical and thematically diverse glossary and companion to the ‘national’ volumes in the series.

A Handbook

Transnational Modern Languages

Loredana Polezzi

migrazioni e identità nel Novecento

Borderlines

With the Tangentopoli corruption scandals of the early 1990s, Italy is purported recently to have experienced a period of political change comparable to the period immediately following World War II. This latter being the socio-political environment in which the concept of impegno - political commitment - in literature became current, this volume asks whether an equivalent moment of constitutional crisis in the 1990s has had a comparable impact on perceptions of the role of the writer and of literature in Italian society. The volume traces the development of impegno in post-war Italian prose literature using the metaphor of fragmentation: the monolithic notion of commitment to an overarching political agenda has splintered, facilitating a fragmentary attention to specific issues. Part One examines the early impegno debate through the critical works of Vittorini, Calvino, Pasolini, tracing it forward into the 1960s and 1970s. The remaining three parts study in detail the 'fragments of impegno' offered by contemporary authors: Tabucchi, Ramondino, De Carlo, Tondelli, Ballestra, and African immigrant writers, including Fazel, Melliti and Methnani. This range of authors and texts illustrates the ways in which socio-political issues are explicitly or implicitly addressed, represented, or embedded in contemporary Italian literature. Jennifer Burns is a lecturer in the Department of Italian at the University of Warwick. She has published articles on Vittorini and Calvino, Italian literature in the 1970s, Tondelli, and immigrant writing in Italian.

Interpretations of Commitment in Contemporary Italian Narrative, 1980-2000

Fragments of Impegno

Worshipped by her fans, denounced by her enemies, and forever shadowed by controversy and scandal, the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand was a powerful thinker whose views on government and markets shaped the conservative movement from its earliest days. Drawing on unprecedented access to Rand's private papers and the original, unedited versions of Rand's journals, Jennifer Burns offers a groundbreaking reassessment of this key cultural figure, examining her life, her ideas, and her impact on conservative political thought. Goddess of the Market follows Rand from her childhood in Russia through her meteoric rise from struggling Hollywood screenwriter to bestselling novelist, including the writing of her wildly successful The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Burns highlights the two facets of Rand's work that make her a perennial draw for those on the right: her promotion of capitalism, and her defense of limited government. Both sprang from her early, bitter experience of life under Communism, and became among the most deeply enduring of her messages, attracting a diverse audience of college students and intellectuals, business people and Republican Party activists, libertarians and conservatives. The book also traces the development of Rand's Objectivist philosophy and her relationship with Nathaniel Branden, her closest intellectual partner, with whom she had an explosive falling out in 1968. One of the Denver Post's Great Reads of 2009 One of Bloomberg News's Top Nonfiction Books of 2009 "Excellent." --Time magazine "A terrific book--a serious consideration of Rand's ideas, and her role in the conservative movement of the past three quarters of a century." --The American Thinker "A wonderful book: beautifully written, completely balanced, extensively researched. The match between author and subject is so perfect that one might believe that the author was chosen by the gods to write this book. She has sympathy and affection for her subject but treats her as a human being, with no attempt to cover up the foibles." --Mises Economics Blog

Jennifer Burns

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