This book is about literary representations of the both left- and right-wing Italian terrorism of the 1970s by contemporary Italian authors. In offering detailed analyses of the many contemporary novels that have terrorism in either their foreground or background, it offers a take on postmodern narrative practices that is alternative to and more positive than the highly critical assessment of Italian postmodernism that has characterized some sectors of current Italian literary criticism. It explores how contemporary Italian writers have developed narrative strategies that enable them to represent the fraught experience of Italian terrorism in the 1970s. In its conclusions, the book suggests that to meet the challenge of representation posed by terrorism fiction rather than fact is the writers best friend and most effective tool.

David Ward is Professor of Italian Studies at Wellesley College, USA. He is the author ofA Poetics of Resistance: Narrative and the Writings of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Antifascisms: Cultural Politics in Italy, 1943-1946, andPiero Gobettis New World: Antifascism, Liberalism, Writing.

1. Introduction.- 2. In Defence of the Rose.- 3. Family Albums ad Conspiracy Theories.- 4. Stranger than Fact.- Bibliography.- Index.