Italian TV Drama and Beyond : Stories from the Soil, Stories from the Sea

by Buonanno, Milly; Radice, Jennifer

• ISBN13: 9781841504599
• ISBN10: 1841504599
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-05-15
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

This book focuses on Italian TV drama, in and through the specific features that, since the inception of television in the mid-Fifties, have shaped and constituted its distinctive "Italianness". The primary intention is to explore the intersection between domestic cultural roots and foreign influences in the construction of a genuinely national storytelling.

Author Biography

Milly Buonanno is Professor of Television Studies at La Sapienza University of Rome, and pioneer in sociological studies of TV drama in Italy. She is the author of The Age of Television: Experiences and Theories (Intellect, 2008).

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
Invisible Italian TV drama	p. 3
The structure of the book	p. 7
Building the Nation: The Origins of Italian TV Drama	p. 11
The words to say it	p. 13
The domestic stage	p. 14
Literary adaptation	p. 16
Electronic library	p. 17
The implication approach	p. 19
The foreign sources of a national genre	p. 22
Literature and history	p. 24
The Cinematic Turn and the Americanization of the Television Landscape	p. 27
Keeping the cinema at bay	p. 29
The cinematic turn	p. 33
The rise of the miniseries	p. 37
The flood of American imports	p. 39
The Italian response to Dallas	p. 42
The Political Career of a Popular Fiction: La Piovra (The Octopus: The Power of the Mafia)	p. 49
A phenomenon of popularity	p. 51
Bond and beyond	p. 52
An intertextual octopus	p. 53
The origins of La Piovra's success	p. 55
Mafia plots	p. 59
Social melodrama	p. 63
The fascination of the loser	p. 68
Italian-style serial	p. 74
Television event	p. 80
The Mafia and politics	p. 83
A Place in the Sun: The First Italian Soap Opera	p. 89
Escape from fiction	p. 91
Turning point	p. 93
The close encounter of local and global	p. 95
An Italian sense of place	p. 97
A seminal story	p. 100
Mimetic Heroes and Ironic Leaders: The Genesis and Evolution of Italian Police Drama	p. 107
The season of the detective story	p. 109
Stories from the sea	p. 110
Stories from the soil	p. 113
The funny detective	p. 116
The hero is 'one of us'	p. 119
A 'heritage' trilogy	p. 121
Squads	p. 125
The girls with a gun	p. 127
Women on top	p. 130
The merging of sailor's and peasant's storytelling	p. 134
In the Footsteps of La Piovra: Twenty years of Mafia stories in Italian TV drama	p. 139
Mob stories are always hot: a tour d'horizon	p. 141
A 20-year cycle	p. 145
The centrality of Cosa Nostra	p. 146
Facts burst into fiction	p. 149
Heroes and villains	p. 153
A male-dominated genre and its exceptions	p. 157
The Mafia is everywhere	p. 162
Life Stories: A Heroic Enclave and the Rise of the Religious Biopic	p. 165
The rebirth of the biopic	p. 167
Anti-heroic society	p. 169
The biography genre and the shifting definition of the fame	p. 172
A heroic enclave	p. 176
The Bible Project	p. 179
A plural Catholicism	p. 188
The Re-enactment of the Past and the Politics of Memory and Identity in Contemporary Drama	p. 197
The temporal turn	p. 199
Past and present	p. 206
Television as historian	p. 209
Divided, denied, shared memory	p. 214
'We are not like them'	p. 221
Conclusion	p. 225
The convocative power of the mainstream drama	p. 227
Visibility for what?	p. 231
References	p. 235
Index	p. 253
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.