Empires within and without: the conquest of the self and the Florentine avant-garde

This article examines the relationship of the young Giovanni Papini to the notion of imperialism. The period of Papini's intellectual formation was a time of intense debate among the Italian intelligentsia concerning imperialism and its relationship to nation and culture. He joined the conversation with a distinctive interpretation of the idea, one that could at once make him heir apparent to the tradition of Umbertian nationalism, while also rejecting the positivist slant of his forebears. William James's porous conception of the subject and Papini's sense of his own fragmented subjectivity provided the ground for a psychological understanding of imperialism: one that relied on knowledge and appreciation, which translated into literature at the individual level, and into culture at that of the nation. Ultimately, however, disappointments abroad, the demands of nationalist politics, and Papini's own avant-garde posture, led him to abandon his intellectual empire in favour of a more concrete one.