‘Spanish’ Flu and the Great War: the block of artistic creativity

This study day is organised in collaboration with the Laboratorio Soldado de Nápoles, directed by Gabriele Frasca of the University of Salerno.
The group investigates the intertwining of the First World War and the pandemic as a determining factor in shaping the artistic and cultural climate of the 1920s. The papers offer a series of critical readings that range across various artistic and disciplinary fields: from the faces of the disease in Egon Schiele to the figures of contagion and contamination in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, to the interweaving of cosmopolitanism and musical nationalism in Igor Stravinsky’s Histoire du soldat, to the impact of the pandemic on the devising of Gian Francesco Malipiero’s Sette canzoni.