The Limits of the Warrior Ideal: Masculinity, Violence, and Social Failure in Interwar Italy

Abstract

This paper analyzes Giovanni Comisso’s novel Il delitto di Fausto Diamante (1933), which explores the turbulent journey of an Italian World War I veteran struggling to adapt to civilian life under the fascist regime, through the framework of militarized masculinity. By tracing the protagonist’s downward spiral into unemployment, poverty, and ultimately homicide, the novel reveals the fragmented and incomplete process of “unmaking” militarized masculinity, showing how this profoundly shaped veterans’ family dynamics and social relationships.

Presenter Biography
Stefano Serafini is Marie Sklodowska-Curie (MSCA) Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Padua, Italy, and Georgetown University, USA. He is the co-editor, with Marco Malvestio, of Italian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (Edinburgh University Press, 2023) and the author of Gothic Italy: Crime, Science, and Literature after Unification, 1861–1914 (University of Toronto Press, 2024, winner of the 2024 American Association for Italian Studies Prize for Literary & Cultural Studies) and Italian Crime Fiction Revisited. Authority, Detection, and the Supernatural, 1861–1941 (Palgrave Macmillan 2025).