LoW Seminar Series: Dr Cristina Savettieri “‘Beautiful Wounds: Male Bodies in Distress in the Italian Literature of the Great War”

Room G.04, School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Leeds, University Road, University of Leeds (Campus map no. 38)

WWI card by Publio Morbiducci, 1916

In this paper, I shall analyse a wide range of representations of wounded male bodies in fictional and non-fictional Italian texts with a view to singling out and discussing shifting values and meanings attached to the image of the combating body in pain. While some texts seem to embrace fully the pedagogy of the nation and conform to conventional images widespread in propagandistic materials, in which wounded bodies are often either aestheticized or sexually charged, others questions the bond connecting virility and male values to suffered violence. Iconographic materials (postcards, illustrations from trench newspapers, posters) will be presented and analysed alongside literary texts.

Dr Cristina Savettieri is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, where she is carrying out an EU-funded project entitled ‘Fatherland as Motherland: Unstable Gender and Nation in the Italian Great war Literature’. She previously worked at the Universities of Pisa and Siena (Italy) and at Freie Universität Berlin (Germany) as an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow in Comparative Literature.