Cultural Form and Political Meaning: State-subsidized Theater, Ideology, and the Language of Style in Fascist Italy

The paradigm linking meaning and content has shaped the empirical focus of cultural focus of cultural analysis. The pattern of state theatrical subsidy within fascist Italy challenges the assumption that narrative content is the principal vehicle of meaning. By shifting the unit of analysis from the text of plays to discourses about theatrical production, a rhetoric of appropriation and reappropriation emerges between regime bureaucrats and cultural entrepreneurs that suggest that theatrical form, and not theatrical content, contained fascist meaning. This finding is extended to posit that the divorce between form and content that characterized the fascist theater also distinguished fascism from liberal democracy.