Italy’s anni di piombo (＂years of lead＂), from roughly 1969 to 1983, was a period of extreme political violence in which Italy experienced some 12,000 incidents of political violence attributed
to 597 groups on both the left and the right. In this work, Antonello (Italian, U. of Cambridge, UK) and O’Leary (Italian, U. of Leeds, UK) present 14 papers seeking to understand how political
violence was expressed, symbolized, and analyzed at different rhetorical, philosophical, and linguistic levels in both artistic representation and other forms of communication. Topics include
the paranoid style in Italian cinema, the figure of the female terrorist in Il prigoniero and Buonggiorno, notte, the relationship between political violence and political theatre, the use of
legal language in the rhetoric of the anni di piombo, contested memories of political violence events in Milan and Piazza Fontana, self-narratives of neofascists, and self-narratives of
political exiles in France. Annotation ©2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
