Fascist Directive

Fascist Directive reveals changes in Ezra Pound’s prose writing resulting from his excitement over Mussolini’s use of Italian cultural heritage to build and promote the modern Fascist state. Drawing on unpublished archival material and untranslated periodical contributions, Catherine E. Paul delves into the vexing work of perhaps the most famous, certainly the most notorious, American in Italy in the 1930s and 1940s, providing fresh understanding of Fascist deployment of art, architecture, blockbuster exhibitions, music, archaeological projects, urban design, and literature. Pound’s prose writings of this period cement a “directive” approach—declaiming his views with an authority that shuts down disagreement. Reading such important prose works as Jefferson and/or Mussolini and Guide to Kulchur, as well as the surprisingly propagandistic aspects of the Pisan Cantos in the context of Pound’s profound investment in Italian Fascist cultural nationalism, Fascist Directive reveals the importance of this approach to his larger artistic mission.