The Fallen Soldier as Fascist Exemplar: Military Cemeteries and Dead Heroes in Mussolini’s Italy

This article aims to dissect the nature of exemplarity in Italian Fascism. The social and political structures that emerged in Fascist Italy were highly reliant on a sense of morality, largely because of the degree of violence inherent in those structures. Under Fascism, morality was founded on concrete examples rather than on abstract principles. Exemplars were idealized sources of moral strength, and figures with the capacity to inspire or persuade. In particular, the fallen soldier and those who died for the nation constituted a major category of Fascist exemplars. Thus, soldiers who fell in the First World War were awarded exemplary status in order to encourage behaviors favorable to the regime. With the goal to demonstrate the importance awarded to exemplars, this paper focuses on a group of ossuaries, or bone depositaries, that were built under Mussolini’s dictatorship, and within which the regime reburied the remains of soldiers who fell in the First World War. The main purpose of the ossuaries was to present the dead as role models that might boost support for a program of nationalism, militarism, and imperialism. Thus, while their creation drew on factors such as Romantic literature and Italy’s religious and political traditions, the ossuaries represent an ideal case study of how Fascist morality was aided by and expressed through the use of exemplars.

Wrong Train to Right Destination: Romantic Journey Motif in The Lunchbox

Purpose of the study: This paper attempts to analyze the theme of journey in The Lunchbox in the context of the varied strains of Romantic journey motifs present in 19th Century and early 20th Century Romanticisms prevalent in England, Germany, France, and America in the said period. Methodology: It is primarily a revisionist study. I have attempted to place The Lunchbox in the context of Romantic literature, predominantly of the 19th Century and early 20th Century and meticulous textual analysis is the basic procedure for this venture. Main Findings: The findings of this study indicate that the theme of the journey is a signature mark of Romanticism has been used in The Lunchbox for remapping geo-cultural imaginaries of contemporary Mumbai, one of the representative cities of South Asia. Journey to some exotic locale has always been considered as an added advantage to the fundamental narrative of a film. Applications of this study: This study will be really helpful to those who want to have a clear idea of the common theme of journey present in different kinds of Romanticisms (Lovejoy, 1924) prevalent in England, Germany, France, and America in the 19th Century and early 20th Century. However temporally and spatially specific, this theme can transcend all the boundaries of time, space, and art form and can be traced in The Lunchbox. Novelty/Originality of this study: The way this paper has attempted to place The Lunchbox in the context of the Romantic literature, predominantly of the 19th Century and early 20th Century, is quite unique, in my opinion. I have not come by any such venture especially relating this movie and the flourish of different Romantic philosophies prevalent in the mentioned segments of the globe in the said period.

Introduction

The introduction reimagines the historical narrative of rivalry between increasingly specialized cultures of medicine and the arts in the Romantic period as instead a period of mutual exchange. This familiar history is belied by the historical movement of the terms “autopsy” and “verve,” which traveled in opposite directions between medical and literary fields during the height of the British Romantic period. The crossing of “autopsy” and “verve” between fields introduces the book’s principal concerns: how shared concepts and critical practices were exchanged between letters and medicine, how new structures of thought crossed between biological and textual concerns, and how tropes of organicity, disease, and treatment in Romantic texts reveal the diagnostic practices that bridged literary and medical cultures. Through a study of the great developments in the history of medicine in this period, and the “metapothecaries” like Samuel Taylor Coleridge who considered literature and medicine through a shared ontology, the chapter argues that Romantic literature develops the notion of protocols of diagnosis—the idea that the same protocols of critical interpretation can be used by doctors to diagnose disease, and by readers to understand works of fiction and poetry. Outlining four protocols of diagnosis that the rest of the book will elaborate, the chapter concludes by linking these four formulations to modern methodologies of critical reading, exploring the resonance of this history to contemporary reflections on the history of what has come to be called “symptomatic reading.”

Isabella in the Marketplace

This chapter begins by distinguishing three modes of the representation of female experience in Romantic literature: conscious feminism; representation of female experience from within the ideological constraints of the dominant order; and representation of female experience without overt consciousness of ideology or social reality. Keats’s narrative poem ‘Isabella or the Pot of Basil’ is considered as working within the third category. The ostensible conventionally Romantic contrast between the idealized lovers and the calculatingly manipulative brothers is analysed as much less straightforward. The oblivion of the lovers to the reality of their social position lays them open to exploitation by the mercantile brothers; the lovers are thus complicit in their own destruction. This complexity is reproduced at the level of the stylistic contrasts within the poem.

Teaching Italian Romanticism through Philately and Choral Works

Philately and choral works can be excellent integrative pedagogical tools when teaching Italian Romanticism at undergraduate level. In the classroom, postage stamps provide an historical narrative for students and can help clarify the political, artistic, and cultural mood of the time. The intrinsic symbolism of stamps represents the way a nation wants to be seen by the rest of the world. Instrumental and choral music, in their infinite combination of tones, blend sound with sung words, creating an artistic subtext that reveals the complexity and variety of human aesthetic expression. For the current generation of students accustomed to visual and auditory learning tools, classroom realia and a multidisciplinary approach to Italian Romantic literature enhance peer discussions, and encourage students to explore and value the development of human thought in all of its non-linear manifestations.

COUNTERDISCURSIVE ARTISTIC STRATEGIES OF UKRAINIAN ROMANTICISM

In Ukrainian romantic literature of the 1830s and 1840s, the authors turned their attention to folk art and historical themes. This aesthetic orientation of writing allowed the creation of texts that revealed aspects of the national life of Ukrainians. Romantic poets sought to artistically comprehend the Ukrainian past, to bring it out of oblivion, which was to help restore the historical memory of society and form a model of national self-identity. The ethnocultural identity, articulated in the texts of the Romantics, challenged the Russian imperial narrative, which sought to marginalize the Ukrainian value system by assimilating it with metropolitan axiology. Romantic literature of the first half of the nineteenth century created a powerful counterdiscursive strategy, which later transformed from the sphere of culture into the socio-political plane. The anti-colonial tendency introduces military symbols into romantic literature, as the appeal to the Cossack heritage actualizes in the Ukrainian cultural code markers of knightly victory and armed defence of the homeland. Romantic poets of the 1830s and 1840s transferred folklore and baroque chronicle imagery to written literature, in which the figures of the Cossacks were often heroized and glorified. Cossack military images allow Ukrainian authors to praise the pre-colonial period and poetize their military might, which, although in literary projection, opposes the oppressor. In the conditions of the Russian imperial discourse, the Ukrainian romantics resorted to the latent challenge to the metropolis, in the image of the enemy depicting the Poles, traditional opponents of the Cossacks. Such a strategy allows us to oppose the imperial narrative not directly, but through intermediaries, which are the Poles. At the same time, along with the military theme, the poetry of the Romantics includes the rhetoric of cruelty, which formats the Ukrainian world, dividing it into “Friends” and “Foes”. In general, the atmosphere of violence that often accompanies the image of the Other in romantic poetry allows us to represent the colonial trauma of the Ukrainian community, as acts of violence are interpreted as “just revenge” on enemies. At the same time, the glorification of one’s cruelty is an attempt to imitate the power of imperial discourse, which always labels such actions as a forced measure to subdue savages or preserve the achievements of civilization. The Ukrainian counterdiscursive strategy in the literature of Romanticism appears as an attempt to oppose and at the same time imitate metropolitan models.

Ecology in Victorian Literature

Ecology, as a topic in studies of Victorian literature, is both longstanding and new. As recently as 2015, scholars were lamenting the field’s seemingly belated turn to ecocritical methods that had become commonplace in studies of romanticism and 19th-century US literature (Taylor 2015). Since then, as the scope of this article suggests, the prevalence of ecological approaches to Victorian literature has expanded greatly. Important forerunners tend to be premised on different assumptions than the newer studies, and, though the emerging field encompasses a variety of interests and approaches, it can be said to exhibit three overall defining characteristics that distinguish it from the ecocritical traditions of other fields: (1) a focus on social and anthropogenic natures; (2) a global, imperial, and systematic framework; and 3) an ethical investment in revealing the connections between 19th-century environmental transformations and environmental crises today. This last quality, above all, separates recent work from essential precursors, such as Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City (1973) and Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots (1983), both of which remain dazzlingly insightful. Perhaps it is unsurprising that literature of the Victorian period, written in the immediate aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, would focus less on the disappearing pastoral of romantic literature and more on the nature-culture formations and anthropogenic assemblages of the modern world, making Victorian ecocriticism less immediately visible as a separate school of interpretation. The fog of Victorian London is one of the most iconic natural images of the era, for example, but only recently has ecocritical scholarship fully conveyed its roots in coal smoke pollution. Similarly, while we have long understood that the literature of the British Empire is formally as well as thematically attuned to interconnection, we have not always appreciated how this capacity also extends to its environmental understanding. The Victorian shockwave of Darwinian theory, which revealed the endless mutability and profound interrelation of species, together with new communication and transportation networks enabled by steam power, integrated the world into a continuous epistemological whole and simultaneously integrated humans into a natural world from which they had long held themselves apart. These new ecological understandings inspired thinkers like John Ruskin and William Morris to develop an environmentalist politics premised on averting the worst excesses of industrial capitalism, but such resistance could, arguably, only soften the blows. Taken together, Victorian literature bears witness, then, to the strange twin birth of “ecology,” a word coined in 1866, and global environmental crisis.