| Abstrakt: |
Using a selected corpus of novels, diaries, memoirs, and theatre plays published between 1915 and 1935, it will be shown how, in the Italian literature of the Great War (the so-called letteratura di guerra), eyes became symbols of patriotic martyrdom, incitement to violence, military community, and humanised authority. Coded as male, nationalistic, and militaristic, in the writings of both prominent and obscure Italian writers and veterans, eyes were simultaneously transformed into chauvinistic and xenophobic marks of exclusion of perceived enemies, women, and social outsiders. It will finally be shown how similar patterns of meaning, as associated with the description of eyes in the letteratura di guerra, can be traced in Fascist literature, pointing towards a hitherto unexplored semantic universe of ocular imagery in interwar Italy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
