ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on the period between 1874 and 1884 when the Southern Question was actually born, and includes a careful reading of the important exile. It discusses the turn these theorists took toward a racial analysis of regional difference. In their view, England's accumulation of colonies was owed to the Nordic or Aryan genes of its populace. The book takes up Sicily's modern writers—Giovanni Verga, Leonardo Sciascia, and Tornasi de Lampedusa—all important figures in Italian literature, and all deeply ambivalent about the possibility that their homeland could ever "improve." It compares Gramsci and De Martino with regard to the counter-intuitive ways that each understood religious beliefs and practices, above all magic, in the rural Mezzogiorno.
