Mobilizing Cultural Identities in the First World War: History, Representations and Memory

by Federica G. Pedriali (Editor), Cristina Savettieri (Editor)

Overview

This book tackles cultural mobilization in the First World War as a plural process of identity formation and de-formation. It explores eight different settings in which individuals, communities and conceptual paradigms were mobilized. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, it interrogates one of the most challenging facets of the history of the Great War, one that keeps raising key questions on the way cultures respond to times of crisis. Mobilization during the First World War was a major process of material and imaginative engagement unfolding on a military, economic, political and cultural level, and existing identities were dramatically challenged and questioned by the whirl of discourses and representations involved.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030427931
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	08/20/2020
Edition description:	1st ed. 2020
Pages:	236
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Federica G. Pedriali is Professor of Literary Metatheory and Modern Italian Studies at the University of Edinburgh, UK. She is the Director of The Edinburgh Journal of Gadda Studies and the Italo-Scottish Research Cluster. She has published widely on the Italian literary canon and its margins, with applications from continental philosophy and biopolitics.

Cristina Savettieri is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Italian Literature at the University of Pisa, Italy. From 2015 to 2017 she was a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, where she carried out an EU-funded research project on gender and nationalism in WWI Italian literature.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction- Cristina Savettieri and Federica G. Pedriali.- Part I: Political Identities.- 2. Classical Idealism and Political Action in the First World War: Jane Malloch and Henry Brailsford- Elizabeth Ellen Pender.- 3. Artists at War: Artistic Identities and the Politics of Culture in Post-World War I Italy- Simona Storchi.- Part II: Italian Masculinities.- 4. “The Genuine Family of My Extraordinary Youth”: Male Bonding in the Italian Literature of the First World War- Marco Mondini.- 5. Gender Trouble in Italian Narratives of Captivity of the First World War- Cristina Savettieri.- Part III: Conceptual Frameworks.- 6. Women, Heroism and the First World War- Angela Hobbs.- 7. Bared and Grievable. Theory Impossible in No Man’s Land- Federica G. Pedriali.- Part IV: Remembering.- 8. Croatia and the First World War. National Forgetting in a Memorial Shatter Zone?- Tea Sindbæk Andersen and Ismar Dedović.- 9. Witnessing the First World War in Britain: the Making of Modern Identities during the Centenary- Ross Wilson.

Editorial Reviews

Mobilizing Cultural Identities in the First World War unites a wide range of insights and offers a useful reading for different audiences. Its multifaceted, transnational approach and the attention that is devoted to often overlooked aspects of the war are just two elements that contribute to the innovative character of the book. It is a refreshing and timely contribution to World War I scholarship which will undoubtedly inspire future research in the field of cultural studies and beyond.” (Eline Batsleer, Annali d'italianistica, Vol. 40, 2022)

“The book showcases the vast range of scholarly work that the cultural study of the First World War can generate. If the richness of approaches may at times come to the detriment of the overall cohesion of the volume, this issueis widely compensated by the high quality of all of the contributions, wisely edited into compact thematic sections resulting in a book that solidly contributes to the interdisciplinary and intermedial ethos that informs today’s scholarship.” (Guido Bartolini, Modern Language Review, Vol. 117 (4), October, 2022)

From the Publisher