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 focu s 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 t he text of plays to discourses about theatrical production, a rhetoric of appropriation and reappropriation emerges between regime bureaucra ts and cultural entrepreneurs that suggests that theatrical form, and not theatrical content, contained fascist meaning. This finding is ext ended to posit that the divorce between form and content that characte rized the fascist theater also distinguished fascism from liberal demo cracy.