1. Introduction- Cristina Savettieri and Federica G. Pedriali -- Part I: Political Identities -- 2. Classical Idealism and Political Action in the First World War: Jane Malloch and Henry Brailsford- Elizabeth Ellen Pender -- 3. Artists at War: Artistic Identities and the Politics of Culture in Post-World War I Italy- Simona Storchi -- Part II: Italian Masculinities -- 4. “The Genuine Family of My Extraordinary Youth”: Male Bonding in the Italian Literature of the First World War- Marco Mondini -- 5. Gender Trouble in Italian Narratives of Captivity of the First World War- Cristina Savettieri -- Part III: Conceptual Frameworks -- 6. Women, Heroism and the First World War- Angela Hobbs -- 7. Bared and Grievable. Theory Impossible in No Man’s Land- Federica G. Pedriali -- Part IV: Remembering -- 8. Croatia and the First World War. National Forgetting in a Memorial Shatter Zone?- Tea Sindbæk Andersen and Ismar Dedović -- 9. Witnessing the First World War in Britain: the Making of Modern Identities during the Centenary- Ross Wilson.

This book tackles cultural mobilization in the First World War as a plural process of identity formation and de-formation. It explores eight different settings in which individuals, communities and conceptual paradigms were mobilized. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, it interrogates one of the most challenging facets of the history of the Great War, one that keeps raising key questions on the way cultures respond to times of crisis. Mobilization during the First World War was a major process of material and imaginative engagement unfolding on a military, economic, political and cultural level, and existing identities were dramatically challenged and questioned by the whirl of discourses and representations involved.