U. Rossi, Il secolo di fuoco: Introduzione alla letteratura di guerra del 20° secolo

Il secolo di fuoco: Introduzione alla letteratura di guerra del 20° secolo

Umberto Rossi

Bulzoni, coll. "Quaderni di storia della critica e delle poetiche", 2008.

Présentation de l'éditeur :

Il secolo di fuoco introduces the vast field of war literature in a unique comparative and interpretive manner. In this comprehensive study scholar Umberto Rossi not only examines war literature from an interpretive stance, but he extends the analytic dimension and scope of 20^th Century war literature by utilizing a comparative approach from a trans-national perspective.

For Rossi's purposes, the war literature discussed in Il secolo di fuoco includes those novels, stories, memoirs and autobiographies (but not poetry) written by authors either directly or indirectly involved in the wars of the 20th Century. The corpus of war literature analyzed includes texts that adopt conventional or innovative narrative strategies and that belong to different genres and national literatures. The authors discussed were involved in wars as combatants or as civilians. Some relevant literary works written by authors who did not personally experience are also included as they offer Rossi precious insights into the overall war experience.

Il secolo di fuoco is helpfully organized around an Introduction in which Rossi's theoretical approach is explained, followed by five Chapters which explore the primary literature of the genre.

The Introduction outlines the constitution of the primary literature, which began independently in France in the 1920s, in Italy in 1970 and in the English-language countries in the mid-1960s.

Following this Introduction, Rossi explores the primary literature in five chapters.

The First chapter is a comparative reading of three classics of 19th-Century literature, namely Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma, Tolstoy's War and Peace and H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds.

The Second chapter deals with the vast literary production of the Great War.

The Third chapter covers the years between W.W.I and W.W.II, focusing on the Spanish Civil war and the colonial wars in Ethiopia and Morocco.

The Fourth chapter is devoted to W.W.II, and is divided into thematic sections where this area of war literature is read according to a series of promising research lines.

The Fifth chapter explores war literature after 1945 along three main axes, each discussed in one of the three sections of the chapter: decolonization wars; the Cold war; media wars.

The book ends with a primary bibliography where texts are grouped according to the war they deal with (which also includes works that have not been discussed in the previous chapters), a secondary bibliography which lists in two separate sections the fundamental book-length critical essays on war literature and the rest of the secondary literature quoted in the book.