ABSTRACT
There has been a tendency in Italian literary criticism to view the contribution of translation during the inter-war years almost exclusively in terms of the literary and aesthetic interests of the cultural elite and the interest that writer-translators such as Cesare Pavese and Elio Vittorini had, in particular, in contemporary American literature. While Francesca Billiani also considers this same intellectual environment, her study is part of a growing body of research into translation in Italy during the Fascist regime which, more or less explicitly and from within different disciplinary fields, seeks to broaden our view of the translation phenomenon and foreground the important role that translation played in this period as, at the same time, a means of cultural exchange, a source of literary innovation (or pollution), an ideological bone of cont ention, and an instrument of cultural expansion and invasion (see Dunnett 2002, Fabre 2007, Fenne 2002, Rundle 2010, Nottola forthcoming, Rubino 2002, forthcoming).
