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The Realms of Identities

A Comment on Class and Politics in Milan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Extract

At the very end of Giuseppe di Lampedusa's The Leopard the priests come and remove the relics preserved and protected by the Prince of Salina's aged daughters, virtually the last survivors of the family. Nothing is left of the fabled world of the Sicilian aristocrats. Even the material and symbolic artifacts of their eminence—the religious relics they guarded and the palace over which they presided—have turned into rubble or taken on the musty air of decay. The world of the Prince of Salina, a world of inherited wealth and power stretching back to the Norman conquests of the eleventh century, of aristocratic balls, of shimmering palaces in Palermo and vast estates in the interior—that world has come to an end.

Type
Special Section: Class Formation and Political Mobilization in Turn-of-the-Century Milan
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1995 

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References

Notes

1 Most recently Geoff Eley and Keith Nield, “Is Class Still a Subject? Comparative Reflections,” presented at the North American Labor History Conference, Wayne State University, October 1994.

2 To cite just two examples among an already large and vital literature: Davidoff, Leonore and Hall, Catherine (1987) Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850. Chicago: University of Chicago PressGoogle Scholar; and Rose, Sonya O. (1991) Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century England. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California PressGoogle Scholar.

3 For a more explicit theoretical statement along these lines, see Aminzade, Ronald (1993) “Class Analysis, Politics, and French Labor History,” in Berlan-stein, Lenard R. (ed.) Rethinking Labor History: Essays on Discourse and Class Analysis. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press: 90113Google Scholar.