This book examines how in Italian literature and film, as well as in society, women were confined to traditional roles and illness often represented the consequence for transgressing those roles. Feigning illness offered women a way to "own" the illness and become masters of their bodies as well as their stories and destinies.

This collection of essays charts the shifting representation of World War II in Italian literature and film from 1943 to the present. The essays examine film genre, cultural history, gender, the Holocaust, emotion studies, shame theory, and environmental studies.

The volume is divided into three sections: cultural transmissions, fractured memories, and nostalgia, to individuate through cultural products--films, poetry, fiction, architectural buildings, autobiographical writing, and social media--the dynamics of memory within Italian culture from World War II to the contemporary times.

In Italy and the Cultural Politics of World War I, well-known scholars of history, political science, film, literature, and cultural studies explore the impact that the Great War had on twentieth-century culture and the enduring legacy of the cultural products that it engendered.