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

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.

1. Introduction- Cristina Savettieri and Federica G. Pedriali

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 Dedovic

9. Witnessing the First World War in Britain: the Making of Modern Identities during the Centenary- Ross Wilson

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.