"Mysterious Flames" engages with Umberto Eco's work from a new perspective, by tracing his intellectual development through the lens of Cultural Studies, drawing in particular on the thought of Antonio Gramsci and Stuart Hall. It offers the first detailed analysis of Eco's representation of Italian fascism across his fiction and non-fiction, focussing especially on his 2004 novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, a semi-autobiographical work that explores fascism through its mass cultural artifacts.

Through a detailed analysis of Eco's novel and a range of his other writings, the book examines how the regime used the media to construct national identity and connects this process to Eco's semiotic approach to subjectivity and individual identity; concepts that he addressed only fragmentarily across his works, without ever articulating into a comprehensive theory. The book aims to stitch these fragments together and thereby to present a cohesive interpretation of fascism and mass culture contained within his work that sheds important new light on Eco's thought.