TY  - BOOK
AU  - Marco Ruggieri
PY  - 2026
CY  - Oxford, United Kingdom
PB  - Peter Lang Verlag
SN  - 1662-9108
SN  - 9781803744063
TI  - "Mysterious Flames"
T2  - Fascism, Identity, and Mass Culture in Umberto Eco
DO  - 10.3726/b21601
UR  - https://www.peterlang.com/document/1418252
N2  - "Mysterious Flames" engages with Umberto Eco’s work from a new perspective, by tracing his intellectual development through the lens of Cultural Studies, drawing in particular on the thought of Antonio Gramsci and Stuart Hall. It offers the first detailed analysis of Eco’s representation of Italian fascism across his fiction and non-fiction, focussing especially on his 2004 novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, a semi-autobiographical work that explores fascism through its mass cultural artifacts.  Through a detailed analysis of Eco’s novel and a range of his other writings, the book examines how the regime used the media to construct national identity and connects this process to Eco’s semiotic approach to subjectivity and individual identity; concepts that he addressed only fragmentarily across his works, without ever articulating into a comprehensive theory. The book aims to stitch these fragments together and thereby to present a cohesive interpretation of fascism and mass culture contained within his work that sheds important new light on Eco’s thought.
KW  - Contemporary Literature, Semiotics, Critical Theory, Fascism, Media, Mass Culture, Identity, National Identity, Memory, European History, Italian History, Italian
LA  - English
ER  -