The Risorgimento Revisited: Nationalism and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Italy

by Silvana Patriarca (Editor), Lucy Riall (Editor)

Bringing together the work of a ground-breaking group of scholars working on the Italian Risorgimento to consider how modern Italian national identity was first conceived and constructed politically, the book makes a timely contribution to current discussions about the role of patriotism and the nature of nationalism in present-day Italy.

Genres: History, Italy, European History

314 pages, Hardcover

First published December 16, 2011

Reviews

[Lavezzij · Rating 3 out of 5]

The editors of this book have obviously written what sounds like doctoral thesis materials discussing some of the background causes and conditions, including material from the the women who supported the main figures like Mazzini and other patriots during the years leading up to war. The writing is scholarly and a bit hard to read, due to the academic style, and is edited into chapters with focus on different topics by different writers in the field. The book is heavily annotated for the research interested, with so much of the material listed as coming from original source material in Italian. That is not to say that the book is not good, and that the material is not important, rather it is unwieldy, and a bit stodgy in style, but blessedly ambitious in listing sources for others interested in the topic.