University of Bergamo
Full Professor
10/ANGL-01 – English and Anglo-American Studies
Department of Languages, Literatures and Foreign Cultures
University of Bergamo
My main research field includes U.S. war literature (mainly on the Vietnam War), literary theory, and the literature of the American West in a transnational perspective.
In this project, my contribution focuses on the differences between discourses on “well-being” in high literature and in commercial literature during the period spanning from the 1860s to the 1920s. More specifically, I aim to highlight the pronounced gap between a canonical literary tradition in which well-being appears, at least on the surface, to be primarily associated with the psychic and spiritual sphere, and commercial literature, where an explicit cult of the body and of the capacity to survive in adverse conditions emerges — anticipating the various forms of the twentieth-century male hero in U.S. war literature, Western literature, and literature centered on sporting heroes. The corpus of commercial texts was selected from the major publishing successes of the period under investigation, which have recently been made available through several digital archives maintained by U.S. universities and research centers.