The Italian Literature of the Axis War

“An innovative investigation of an understudied aspect of the post-war period, The Italian Literature!of the Axis War devotes renewed critical attention to texts and authors consistently and often deliberately occluded in previous literary histories. This work sheds new light on Italy’s efforts to remember as well as to forget the Second World War.”—Charles L. Leavitt IV, University of Notre Dame, USA
“Through rigorous and original research, using refined notions of literary criticism, Guido Bartolini impeccably examines how Italian literature contributed to moulding the collective memory of the Axis War. This is essential reading for understanding how Italy evaded guilt for the war of aggression fought at the side of Nazi Germany and constructed a self-absolving memory centred on the stereotype of the ‘good Italian.’”—Filippo Focardi, University of Padua, Italy
This book investigates the representation of the Axis War – the wars of aggression that Fascist Italy fought in North Africa, Greece, the Soviet Union, and the Balkans, from 1940 to 1943 – in three decades of Italian literature. Building on an innovative and interdisciplinary methodology, which combines memory studies, historiography, thematic criticism, and narratology, this book explores the main topoi, themes, and masterplots of an extensive corpus of novels and memoirs to assess the contribution of literature to the reshaping of Italian memory and identity after the end of Fascism. By exploring the influence that public memory exercises on literary depictions and, in return, the contribution of literary texts to the formation and dissemination of a discourse about the past, the book examines to what extent Italian literature helped readers form an ethical awareness of the crimes committed by members of their national community during World War II.
Guido Bartolini is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at University College Cork, Ireland, where he works on the cultural memory of fascism and its representation in Italian literature and cinema.