In this book, Stefania Lucamante argues for the continued relevance of the arts and literature as an active means of social change. In making this case, she intervenes in recent debates taking place in Italy and Italian Studies surrounding a so-called lack of impegno in postmodern Italian literature and cinema. Various reasons for this lack have been proposed, from cynical disengagement, to a failure to fully understand the dangers of Berlusconi's manipulation of mass media, to a mistrust of power and totalising discourse (pp. 21–25). Here, Lucamante offers an alternative perspective on postmodernism and impegno, proposing that ‘[r]ather than focusing on one particular socio-political theme, a recognized attention to the body and the passions as an epistemological concern underlying the text, as well as to the text's corporeality (a text is a body), diffuses the theme of commitment by encompassing a considerable part of the narrative and visual construction in literature and cinema’ (p. 24).

In particular, Lucamante analyses the way indignation, considered a ‘social passion’ (p. 3), can fuel righteous anger which in turn inspires the authors and filmmakers under discussion to demand action through the creation of postmodern narrative visions. Lucamante, who connects David Hume's thought on social passions to the work of figures such as Jacques Rancière, Sara Ahmed, and Sianne Ngai, situates this study of ‘the constructive side’ of artists’ ‘moral indignation’ (p. 64) within the ‘emotional turn’ in the humanities. She describes her aspiration for the book, explaining that it ‘grounds the impact of feelings in twenty-first-century Italian works that disclose thought-provoking discourses and practices in hopes of generating new directions in literary criticism and finding a place for Italian cinematic and literary narratives within the international current debate on the theory of emotion and affect’ (p. 5).

Each of the book's three parts explores a different expression of anger as employed by a variety of authors and filmmakers. The multiple narrative case studies give a broad sense of the intensely innovative and committed work that has been, and is being, produced in contemporary Italy. Lucamante interweaves substantial descriptive segments with rigorous analysis and theorisation. ‘Part One – Anger and Commitment in the Narratives of Tiziano Scarpa: Impegno in a Liquid Age’, begins with a chapter on Pasolini's La rabbia, and Pasolini remains a touchstone throughout Lucamante's subsequent assessment of Scarpa's work. She aligns Pasolini and Scarpa in their roles as ‘kamikazes’ or ‘pirates’ who attempt to disorient readers in order to reorient them through their use of the rhetoric of disgust, which serves to ‘establish kinship’ with readers through ‘shared disgust’ (p. 63). Thus, in Scarpa's experimental narratives of the late 1990s and early 2000s inspired by constructive indignation, Lucamante identifies ‘new forms with which to rethink aesthetics and the means to convey images of a community that has lost its moral compass’ (p. 103).

While the previous chapters highlight Scarpa's reflection on and elaboration of the role of the author as engaged community member through his art, the narratives analysed in ‘Part Two – Anger and Spaces of Vulnerability in the Narratives of Melania Mazzucco and Monica Stambrini’ shift the targets of constructive indignation to domestic violence, misogyny, and homophobia, as experienced by women and children in contemporary Italy. Lucamante asserts that Un giorno perfetto by author Mazzucco and Benzina by filmmaker Stambrini, to paraphrase Mazzucco, ‘demonstrate how female artists are not wrapped in their own existence and do not produce self-reflexive narratives based on narcissistic projections of the self, but offer their narratives as the space to voice their concern for current affairs’ (p. 106). Lucamante, employing Judith Butler's work on vulnerability and resistance, demonstrates the ways Mazzucco and Stambrini approach vulnerability not as a biological trait but as imposed upon women by patriarchal society, a failure to defend women's legal status, and a shirking of responsibility on the part of neighbours and communities to intervene in violent acts. The chapters on Mazzuco and Stambrini also include substantial and thought-provoking sections on the urban landscape of Rome, such as the GRA, as well as enlightening passages on maternity and motherhood in Italian culture.

In ‘Part Three – Anger and Love in Spaces of Otherness in the Narratives of Paolo Sorrentino, Simona Vinci, and Veronica Tomassini’, Lucamante extends her discussion of spaces (expressed in these chapters as ‘heterotopia’) and gender while turning to the topic of erotic love, or rather ‘the emotional life of characters facing the pressure of strenuous situations that originate in erotic passion’ in three works by different authors (p. 176). Lucamante reads these works together in part because of the authors’ strategies of ‘estrangement to underscore the individual's indignation’ and the construction of ‘counter-narratives to conventional renderings of love, through reflections that stem from an individual love story but expand to include society’ (p. 176). In Sorrentino's Le conseguenze dell'amore, love disrupts the protagonist's ‘stoic compliance with Mafia rules’ (p. 203). Lucamante argues that Simona Vinci, while playing with the boundaries between novel and autobiography, converts personal anger into constructive indignation as she ‘denounces women's abuse in many parts of society’ (p. 257), and that Veronica Tomassini expresses indignation with her community's lack of hospitality towards migrants through her fragmented narrative about a marriage. The chapter dedicated to Sorrentino stands out for Lucamante's sustained critique of the misogyny present in his body of work with regard to the representation of women and their function as destabilising forces in men's lives, although indignation does not feature as prominently in this chapter as in others.

This book includes material that will be of interest to scholars of contemporary Italian literature and cinema, affect studies, and those engaged with issues surrounding impegno and postmodernism. The discussions of gender and women authors and filmmakers are particularly strong.