Selections from cultural writings / edited by David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith

The division of this volume into ten sections and our criteria of selection and arrangement require a word of explanation. Section I (Proletarian Culture') is made up of articles taken from various Italian editions of Gramsci's early writings (the first three volumes of an eight-volume critical edition, collectively titled Scritti 1913-1926, in course of publication by Einaudi, Turin, have appeared at the time of going to press; elsewhere we have used the old editions). The ordering of Section I is not strictly chronological. It is divided, rather, into three parts which are in turn subdivided by theme. The aim here has been to provide a selection representative of the range and main interests of Gramsci's early cultural writings.

The remaining nine sections, all consisting of writings taken from the Prison Notebooks, posed more substantial problems of selection and grouping. Gramsci rewrote some of his first drafts of notes, in 1931-33 in Turi prison and 1934-35 in the Formia clinic (see General Introduction). The second-draft versions usually arrange the notes either into bigger and thematically more coherent bunches or into 'special notebooks' on specific themes (Risorgimento, Americanism and Fordism, etc.). While several of these special notebooks have a district thematic unity, the two which Gramsci devoted to literature (Notebook 21, 'Popular Literature' and Notebook 23, 'Literary Criticism') do not. A number of diverse thematic threads go into them, which sometimes cross-refer to each other between the two notebooks and sometimes pull apart from each other within a single notebook. In addition, many notes on literature were left in their first and only versions, scattered among the earlier miscellaneous notebooks. Given these aspects of the original text, it was clearly impossible to adopt for this translation, with its thematic slant, the arrangement of the notes in Valentino Gerratana's critical edition Quaderni del carcere, 4 volumes, Einaudi, Turin 1975 (hereafter referred to as Q). We were guided instead by the thematic arrangement used in the first Einaudi editions of Felice Platone (6 volumes, Turin 1948-51), ticularly Letteratura e vita nazionale (1950, hereafter LVN) to which the majority of notes in Section II to IX of this volume correspond. Platone generally rearranged the notes on literature under the recurring headings which Gramsci gave to many of them in his manuscript (for instance Popular literature', 'Father Bresciani's progeny', 'Non national-popular character of Italian literature'), adding to these a number of notes without such headings which seemed thematically assimilable to them. A later anthology by Giuliano Manacorda, Marxismo e letteratura (Riuniti, Rome 1975), drew on LVN for its basic outline but also interspersed cultural texts from some of the other Platone volumes and (without indication) from the early writings. We have up to a point followed the arrangements of both these editions, while at the same time making changes to the division, composition and internal ordering of the sections where these appeared to be justified on thematic grounds. The translations, however, are all from Q.