Return to order as return to realism in two Italian elite literary magazines of the 1920s and 1930s: La Ronda and Orpheus

This article discusses two short-lived Italian Modernist journals, La Ronda (1919-23) and Orpheus (1932-34), that across the Fascist Ventennio embraced an ethos of engaged indifference in order to function as comparable forces for aesthetic innovation. It explores the concepts of 'return to order' and 'return to realism' in aesthetics and politics, while placing these debates within the European network of periodical culture, in order to demonstrate how, in the age of totalitarianisms in Italy, such intellectual indifference translated into a productive form of engaged indifference that sought aesthetic innovation and intellectual exchange while often avoiding direct political confrontation. © Modern Humanities Research Association 2013.