Historical fiction has always been a popular genre in international children's literature, and recent decades have seen a notable increase in the number of novels for children set during the First World War. Providing authentic experiences of past events while simultaneously respecting the attitudes and norms of today's readers can, however, constitute a significant ideological and philosophical conundrum. As Catherine Butler and Hallie O'Donovan have observed, 'in a world riven by the effect of cultural mistrust and incomprehension writers seem to face a difficult choice: that of presenting a sanitized past with at least the sympathetic characters displaying an ahistorically liberal sensibility; or appearing to normalise and perpetuate those attitudes through fiction.' Innovative narrative techniques and point-of-view shifts can be effective tools for engaging contemporary readers with the past, and narratives with first-person perspectives and multiple focalization have become extremely popular in contemporary First World War fiction for children. The employment of unconventional narrative perspectives is not, however, in and of itself, inherently progressive; the ideological message of any text being as bound up with the plot, the language, the structural patterns, and the characterization as well as with the accompanying paratextual materials. National biases can also often exert a powerful influence on the content and style of children's historical fiction, particularly when the work is set during a founding moment in that nation's history.

Italy's experience of the First World War was markedly different from that of other participating nations. Unlike Great Britain, France, Russia, [End Page 167] and Germany who entered the conflict in 1914 as a result of the invasion of Serbia, Italy did not enter the war until May 1915, and when she did join her reasons for doing so were primarily territorial. Buku Ajar Fisiologi Kedokteran Ganong Pdf Writer. The Italian government was hopeful that an Allied victory would result in the acquisition of Trieste, Gorizia, and Trentino, lands on the Austro-Italian border which many believed to be the rightful possession of the newly united nation.

The battles for which the Italian soldiers were recruited were all against the nation's archenemies the Austrians—even if many of the latter ones witnessed the demise of as many German as Austrian soldiers. The wartime propaganda continually cast the conflict as an extension of the Italian Unification, a process that had begun in the early eighteen hundreds and had given rise in 1861 to the establishment of the Kingdom of Italy.