The Fascist Canon Renzo De Felice and the Writing of History

Abstract

In recent years, particularly after Renzo De Felice's death in 1996, the perception of this historian's historiographical role as foundational for Italian history has been expanded to the extent that his oeuvre has now been canonized in Italy as the expression of a putatively hegemonic historiography on fascism. This paper argues that this canonization process should be analyzed in critical terms since, as with any canon, De Felice's work has — beyond its indisputable analytical coherence — ambivalent functions. These functions are related, not only to problems inherent in the historical discipline and its tendency to present historiographical frameworks as hegemonies, but also to dimensions of the canonical text itself. Thus, an explicit aim of this paper is to develop a reading that counteracts the excesses of canonization in Italian historiography.