This edited volume examines a century of Italian war narratives through the lens of the antihero as a form of resistance. Rather than privileging epic or superhuman figures, the collection focuses on marginal and often silenced voices, showing how Italian literature and cultural discourse have increasingly emphasised lived experience over heroic abstraction. Across ten thematically organised chapters, contributors analyse novels, short stories, diaries, memoirs, poetry and cinematic narratives to trace the emergence of the antihero as a challenge to totalitarianism, militarised rhetoric, and state-sponsored memory.
The volume explores the multifaceted nature of resistance (historical, existential, and symbolic), the ethics of memory writing, the disruption of gendered war paradigms, and the rhetorical function of narrative in constructing national identity. While focusing on the World Wars and the Italian Resistance, the collection employs an interdisciplinary framework where literary analysis effectively intersects with historical enquiry. Moving beyond canonical fiction to incorporate testimonial and non-literary forms, it successfully expands war studies by connecting these historical insights to more contemporary events.
The organisation of the essays reflects the editors’ prioritisation of theoretical enquiries over a strict chronological narrative. Chapters are grouped by analytical approach: moving from historical and ontological resistance (Chapter 1) to rhetorical and identity construction (Chapters 2–3). A significant portion of the volume is dedicated to examining ethical and moral choices through various marginal testimonies (Chapters 4, 5, 6, and 8). Finally, the collection addresses literary demystification and anti-epic strategies (Chapters 7, 9, and 10). This thematic structure successfully foregrounds the power of marginal voices in disrupting the official linear account of military events.
A significant strength of the volume lies in its engagement with canonical Italian authors. In the first essay, Veronica Frigeni uses Agamben’s theory of ‘resistance as potentiality’ (pp. 5, 11) to explain how Antonio Tabucchi’s heroes question political systems from within as a symbolic and textual strategy. Frigeni’s analysis of Tabucchi’s fiction, including Piazza d’Italia, Sostiene Pereira, and Tristano muore, supported by her extensive previous scholarship on this author, offers a reading of resistance as a moral and poetic stance articulated through antiheroic figures. Michela Barisonzi, in the seventh essay, explores Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Notturno, tracing a shift from nationalist exaltation of the Nietzschean superman to an intimate recognition of the common soldier’s vulnerability, thereby redefining heroism in collective and spiritual terms. Similarly, the ninth chapter analyses Ardengo Soffici’s war writings, highlighting satire and the antiheroic figure of Captain Punzi as tools for exposing military incompetence and undermining hierarchical authority. The concluding chapter finally broadens the volume’s literary-historical framework: Tancredi Artico traces the emergence of an anti-epic rhetoric in Italian World War I literature, arguing that authors such as Emilio Lussu and Carlo Emilio Gadda employed classical references not to revive heroic myth, but to demystify warfare and foreground survival, corporeality, and historical truth.
Other contributions shift the focus from literary canon to contested memory and ethical ambiguity. In the second essay, Louise Zamparutti examines representations of the Foibe massacres in contemporary Italian media and political rhetoric, arguing that binary narratives of innocent Italian victimhood and demonised Slavic others obscure Fascist violence and consolidate a right-wing national identity. In the third essay, Lisa Vitale revisits the controversial figure of Margherita Marchione, reframing her defence of Pope Pius XII during the Holocaust as a form of antiheroic memory work centred on individual acts of rescue and survival rather than institutional accountability.
The volume also underlines the importance of personal and marginal testimonies in capturing human experiences that elude conventional historical accounts. In the fourth essay, Luigi Gussago (the volume’s editor) situates the Italian antihero within a transnational framework by comparing two Italian literary depictions of deserters with works like Catch-22 and Paths of Glory. Gianluca Cinelli, in the fifth essay, examines the clandestine diary of Donato Guglielmi, an Italian medical officer imprisoned in the Soviet Union, portraying him as an antihero who rejects both fascist and communist ideologies to preserve human dignity under extreme conditions.
Questions of gender and agency are most explicitly addressed in the sixth essay by Pina Palma, the second editor of the volume. Palma’s analysis of Ada Gobetti’s Partisan Diary traces the Italian antifascist journalist and leader’s transformation from intellectual observer to active leader in the Resistance; these diaries dismantle restrictive gender norms while offering a philosophical reflection on political action. In the eighth chapter, Andrea Sartori similarly reframes resistance by examining Antonio Barolini’s Le notti della paura, which proposes an everyday heroism rooted in pacifism, moral consistency, and individual conscience rather than violence.
The volume’s most significant limitation, however, lies in the scope implied by its title. Despite presenting itself as a survey of a ‘century’ of Italian war narratives, the collection concentrates primarily on the First and Second World Wars, the Italian Resistance, and the Foibe massacres. The introduction mentions broader temporal and geopolitical horizons – including classical antiquity, contemporary conflicts, and Portuguese Fascism. It draws on non-Italian figures such as Louise Glück, Johan Huizinga, and Theodor W. Adorno to conceptualise war as spiritual rupture, cultural practice, and historical sabotage by the vanquished. With such a comparative framework enriching the theoretical apparatus, readers may reasonably expect sustained engagement with other twentieth-century conflicts involving Italy, such as colonial wars in Africa, the Italo-Turkish War, the Spanish Civil War, or the occupation of the Balkans. Inclusion of literary responses to these conflicts would not only have strengthened the volume’s claim to comprehensiveness but also tested whether the editors’ definition of the antihero can withstand the racialised hierarchies of colonial ideology and the myths of genetic superiority, often used to legitimise colonial violence.
However, overall, the collection offers a compelling and ethically grounded rethinking of Italian war narratives. Its emphasis on antiheroism provides a productive framework for interrogating memory, resistance, and the human cost of conflict, making it a valuable contribution to scholarship and pedagogy in comparative literature, cultural studies and Italian studies, particularly within the fields of war literature and cultural memory.
