Risorgimento in Modern Italian Culture collects the work of scholars whose different methodologies and fields of specialty provide a starting point to appraise the enduring significance of the nineteenth-century past in modern Italy from a variety of traditional as well as hitherto less studied perspectives. While the first part of the volume, "Recent Histories of the Risorgimento" is devoted to an examination of the current work of Risorgimento historians, the remaining five parts have been allocated to describe the use of the ninetheenth-century past in modern narratives, including film and, especially, the novel, since this is a genre that historically has occupied a unique position in defining the Italian nation and its people.

Norma Bouchard is associate professor of Italian and comparative literary and cultural studies at the University of Connecticut, Storrs.