Chapter 3 - Fascism

Summary

The fascist counter-revolutions and reactionary insurgencies that disfigured Europe across the ‘Thirty Years War’ 1914–45 generated, in the realm of literature, art, music, and periodical publication, a complex culture of resistance in anti-fascism. More than the sum of its socialist, liberal democratic, Communist and feminist parts, anti-fascism formed a distinct cultural sphere in Europe and the United States, with its own newspapers, journals, publishing styles, and audiences. The links it forged between European and non-European poets and writers focused on the threat of fascism in Austria, Germany, and Italy, provoked, in turn, questions about the nature of European colonial war abroad, gender relations in democratic nations, and the sources of fascism’s strength. Paying particular attention to both the place of gender in the anti-fascist imagination, by way of a reading of Virginia Woolf, and the anti-colonial challenge anti-fascism faced, this chapter explores literary responses to fascism.