Trading Rationality for Tomatoes: The Consolidation of Anglo-American National Identities in Popular Literary Representations of Italian Culture

In The Rhetoric of Empire (1993), David Spurr analyzes journalistic discourse on the Third World and isolates a nucleus of rhetorical figures around which representations of the colonial and post-colonial other are articulated. In this paper, I will borrow, in particular, three of these rhetorical figures (naturalization, idealization, appropriation) and I will adapt them to the context of contemporary Anglo-American representations of Italian culture in popular literature. I will argue that a substantial number of contemporary works on Italy retains the basic assumption of a world ordered around a dichotomy between modern cultures and pre-modern ones, and makes of this taxonomy the basic spatiotemporal context for its narratives.