Making the Italians: Poetics and Politics of Italian Children's Fantasy by Lindsay Myers, and: Pinocchio, Puppets and Modernity: The Mechanical Body ed. by Katia Pizzi (review)

In 2002, France issued colorized silver commemorative coins honoring three icons of children's literature: Snow White, Cinderella, and Pinocchio. The Pinocchio piece features Geppetto holding a stringed puppet even though Carlo Collodi's puppet never had strings, which suggests to me that more people know of Pinocchio than know about him. Pinocchio is a living and malleable metaphor with many avatars, only one of which is the character in Collodi's original masterpiece. The two volumes under review are not entirely about Pinocchio, but he is a unifying element in each. Collodi's tale is an anchor of sorts in Lindsay Myers's chronological primer on the development of Italian children's fantasy since national unification. Katia Pizzi's edited volume centers Pinocchio in wide-ranging discussions of mechanical beings and their cultural import. In both cases, the cover art demonstrates Pinocchio's evocative power: Making the Italians pictures Vitruvian Pinocchio, a humorous but apt adaptation of Leonardo's famous image; while an almost alien-looking Pinocchio astride a space capsule headed for the moon graces the cover of the essay collection. The books are very different from one another in purpose, form, style, and almost any other way one could imagine, though Pinocchio informs both.

Making the Italians is a compact and meticulously structured text. Between the introduction and the conclusion are ten chapters, the first of which lays out the rationale and methodology. Each of the nine remaining chapters links a particular period in postunification Italian history to the subgenre of fantasy that Myers claims best exemplifies the historical moment. Each of these chapters is named for the subgenre to be examined and begins with a focused overview of the historical period, followed by clearly and uniformly delineated sections devoted, respectively, to the subgenre's structural features, social and political contexts, and "structure and purpose." The copious footnotes and impressive bibliographies leave no question about the thoroughness of Myers's scholarship. The index is useful. The structural consistency and survey approach are appropriate to an introductory volume that might serve as a textbook, a very good and readable one. At the outset, I should say that although I have been a student of Pinocchio for a long time and have some knowledge of Italian history, most of what I know of non-Pinocchio Italian children's fantasy is the result of reading this book. In that sense, I fit the profile of what I take to be the intended audience. Any reader wanting an authoritative commentary on Myers's specific critiques will need to go elsewhere.

Myers's project is to trace the parallel evolution of Italian children's fantasy and the modern Italian state. Dissolving interior borders and creating a central government were important steps in the creation of a new peninsular nation, but promoting a lingua franca and instilling in the people a sense of Italian identity were lingering obstacles to cultural unification. In a footnote, Myers explains that at the time of unification literacy rates in most regions were under 50 percent, and that it was the advent of television that did the most to promote "standard" Italian over regional dialects (22). Recognizing that it is easier to mold children than to retrofit adults, the new state and its cultural proponents focused on school reform and developing a new national literature for children. Thus, from the start, the link between politics and children's fantasy was often conscious. On one end of the spectrum are rich, multidimensional, and socially conscious tales such as The Adventures of Pinocchio; on the other, blatant propaganda such as the hero fantasies of the Fascist 1930s.

Myers examines texts from both a semiotic and a contextual perspective. She categorizes tales into subgenres according to their form, structure, and motifs while at...