Studi di archivistica, bibliografia, paleografia

«Sarebbe più logico bruciarli». Una nota sulla censura dei libri nel fascismo

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Abstract

The article is devoted to the historiography on book censorship during fascism published in the last twentyfive years. Censorship was not unknown to Liberal Italy, since in 1890 Crispi introduced the need for a control by the Ministry of Interior of any political publication. Censorship acted on political texts, for example intervening on the school edition of Mazzini’s Duties of Man (1903) to erase references to republicanism, or on moral grounds in the case of sexual references contained in Marinetti’s novel Mafarka (1910). During fascism the first moves towards book censorship were made in 1926, and strenghtened in 1930. Censorship was heavily enforced since 1934, apparently after Mussolini was especially irritated by the cover of a novel which displayed an African woman embraced by an Italian man: a situation which the dictator deemed unappropriate on “racial” grounds. The most severe censorship was enforced since 1938 concerning Jewish and foreign authors. But there were relevant political and “moral” cases of censorship throughout the 1930s.


Open access

Submitted: May 22, 2023 | Published Oct. 23, 2023 | Language: it

Keywords Racism • Books • Publishing • Antisemitism • Censorship • Fascism

Copyright © 2023 Simon Levis Sullam. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/978-88-6969-727-2/020


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