Content area
Full Text
Prison Notebooks, vol. III, by Antonio Gramsci. Ed. and trans. by Joseph A. Buttigieg. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. $50.00. Pp. xii, 675.
Antonio Gramsci made his entry into the English-speaking world in 1957, when International Publishers published extracts from the Prison Notebooks translated by Louis Marks. From that time to the early 1990s, rapidly growing interest in Gramsci was evidenced in a series of anthologies of his writings; the most widely used of these was the 1971 volume Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. Other English-language anthologies of Gramsci's writings include: Selections from Political Writings 1910-1920, edited by Quintin Hoare and translated by John Mathews (University of Minnesota Press, 1977); Selections from Political Writings 1921-1926, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare (International Publishers, 1978); and A Gramsci Reader, edited and translated by David Forgacs (Lawrence and Wishart, 1988). All of these volumes were inspired to one extent or another by John Cammett's groundbreaking study Antonio Gramsci and the Origins of Italian Communism (Stanford University Press, 1967).
In the late 1980s, through a collaborative effort by the Gramsci Institute in Rome and Columbia University Press, Joseph A. Buttigieg undertook the task of editing and translating an integral English-language edition of the Prison Notebooks, the first volume of which appeared in 1992, and the second in 1996. The third volume of this unusual publishing project, under review here, will be followed by two additional volumes.
Buttigieg has drawn heavily on the work of Valentino Gerratana, whose 1975 integral Italian edition of the Prison Notebooks supplied him with a large portion of his scholarly apparatus, and of Antonio Santucci, author...