John Champagne's latest work is an erudite monograph at the intersection of Italian Studies,
queer theory, literary criticism, history, and art history. The author argues that his book,
unveiling contradictions and ambiguities of Fascist Italy,'might restore to the ventennio a
however circumscribed heterogeneity, instability, or even dialecticism that an adjective like
totalitarian risks occluding'(18). To that aim Champagne analyses a few examples of the
extensive artistic production of writer Giovanni Comisso, painter and writer Filippo de Pisis …

Oxford and New York, 2013), Champagne deals with the queer subjectivities of modernists
Giovanni Comisso, Filippo de Pisis and Corrado Cagli. He counters the limited and
invariably homophobic interpretations of their work largely dominated by the context of
Mussolini's fascist regime (and lack of obvious resistance on the artists' part to that regime)
and a broader established critical reception. In the introductory chapter (1-27), Champagne
questions the influence of context in shaping critical interpretation of the work of these queer …