Page 358 - Costellazioni 2

vincing and passionate story of one of the most tragic fronts in the
Great War. Moreover, the book closes with a passionate denunciation
of the way the demobilization of the army was implemented, and how
it afected veterans’s lives. The book is a valuable historical and literary
source regarding a controversial time in Italian history.

Socialists at the Front: Consonances and Differences. Comparative
Considerations on the War Memoirs of Emilio Lussu and Antonio
Greppi
JACOPO PERAZZOLI
This essay compares two Great War memoirs, Emilio Lussu’s Un anno
sull’altipiano and Antonio Greppi’s No i sul Carso. The analysis focuss-
es on the diversity of contexts and of writing modes in the work of
these two Italian socialists authors: while Un anno sull’altipiano is a
crude report of what happened to the Sardinian Brigade on the Asiago
plateau during 1916-1917 and was wri en by Lussu during his Paris
exile in 1936-1937, No i sul Carso was composed by Greppi in around
the same years but within fascist Italy, and is a more reassuring nar-
rative of his experience at the front. The paper also contrasts the rep-
resentation of the war by Lussu and Greppi, whose books stand as
complementary narratives of the war, and neither of which, however,
may be ascribable to the fascist rhetoric regarding the Great War.

Popular Diaries from the Great War: Narrative Strategies and Forms
PAOLA CANTONI
In popular writings at the time of the First World War there are to be
found different levels of writing proficiency that represent an impor-
tant test for the dynamics of literacy that were under way. This study
aims to identify and describe the syntactic and textual mechanisms
used by writers of different social and regional backgrounds in their
diaries. The essay looks at a number of unpublished diaries as regards
writing typology and structure, use of tenses, opening formulae, topic
representation, narrative progression, and certain lexical peculiarities.
Features of the authors’ narrative awareness and the effectiveness of
the texts are also discussed, as popular diaries sometimes display
greater evocative power than literary texts and a charming sense of
truthfulness and spontaneity.

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