Neorealism and the "New" Italy

Neorealism and the " New" Italy
centers on neorealist Italian artists' use of compassion as a vehicle to express their characters' interactions. Simonetta Milli Konewko proposes that compassion as an emotion may be activated to unify certain individuals and communities and investigates the mechanisms that allowed compassion to operate during the postwar period. Aiming to produce a deeper understanding of the ways in which Italy is re-encoded and reconstructed, this book explores the formation of Italian identity and redefines neorealism as a topic of investigation.

Introduction. - Part I: Neorealism: What Is and is Not. - The Italian Roots of Neorealism. - Neorealism and Film. - Neorealism and Literature. - Emotions in Neorealism. - Part II:Compassion: What Is and Is Not. - The Nature of Compassion. - Compassion and Pity, Sympathy, and Empathy. - Occurrences of Compassion. - Rethinking Compassion in Light of Neorealism. - The Discourse of Compassion during Fascism. - Part III: Charting Landscapes of Compassion during World War II. - Compassion in Ginzburg s Depictions of Family Relationships. - Moravia s Representation of Compassion. - Women, Compassion, and the Resistance Movement in
L Agnese va a morire
. - Compassion and the Construction of Women s Identity in
Rome, Open City
. - Part IV: Compassion and the Holocaust. - Compassion in
Survival in Auschwitz
. - Compassion in
Smoke over Birkenau
. - Bibliography.