Selena Daly | University College London (original) (raw)
Monographs by Selena Daly
Toronto: University of Toronto Press , Aug 2016
One of five non-fiction books shortlisted for The Bridge Book Prize 2017. This book is the fi... more One of five non-fiction books shortlisted for The Bridge Book Prize 2017.
This book is the first comprehensive study of Futurism during the First World War period. In this book, she examines the cultural, political, and military engagement of the Futurists with the war effort, both on the battlefields and on the home front.
Reviewed in Italian Studies, Annali d'Italianistica, Choice Reviews for Academic Librarians, and International Yearbook of Futurism Studies
Edited Books by Selena Daly
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018
Journal Articles by Selena Daly
Italian Studies, 2019
The Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, built between 1865 and 1867, is the heart of the Lomb... more The Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, built between 1865 and 1867, is the heart of the Lombard capital. Giovanni Verga, a resident of the city for twenty years, was the Galleria’s most faithful and consistent chronicler in his Milanese short stories. While his contemporaries tended to portray the Galleria as a melting pot, Verga depicted it as home to two distinct categories of people: aspiring artists and fallen women. He employed these figures and the space of the Galleria as a means to reflect on and grapple with his anxieties about the changing position of women in late nineteenth-century Italian society. I argue that Verga chose to pathologise the space of the Galleria to warn ‘respectable’ women off and to maintain highly gendered conceptions of public and private realms. This article thus explores Verga’s representation of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II between 1875 and 1892, with an emphasis on the gendered dynamics of movement in this temple of consumerism.
Modern Language Notes, May 2016
Romance Studies, 2016
This paper establishes the mock-epic poem, Re Orso, by Arrigo Boito, first published in 1864, as ... more This paper establishes the mock-epic poem, Re Orso, by Arrigo Boito, first published in 1864, as an under-acknowledged source text for Le Roi Bombance, an important pre-Futurist play by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, first published in 1905. In so doing, Boito’s legacy to twentieth-century Italian modernism is asserted, a standing often denied to him. In addition, the debt Marinetti owed to nineteenth-century Italian literature is also established, a point often neglected due to the fact that Marinetti wrote exclusively in French between 1899 and 1912. A new interpretation of the philosophy of Re Orso is offered, which argues that a rejection of anthropocentrism constitutes the poem’s central message. The paper demonstrates how Le Roi Bombance built on the ideas put forward in Re Orso, and how Marinetti would subsequently establish a rejection of the anthropocentric system as an important element of his Futurist theory of literature, following the launch of the Futurist movement in 1909.
Annali d'Italianistica. Special issue on The Great War and the Modernist Imagination, eds. Luca Somigli and Simona Storchi, Sep 2015
International Yearbook of Futurism Studies. Special issue on Women Futurists, 2015
Mary Swanzy was an important Irish avant-garde painter of the early twentieth century. She studie... more Mary Swanzy was an important Irish avant-garde painter of the early twentieth century. She studied in Paris for a time and is noted for her Cubist-inspired paintings. However, her œuvre also shows influences of Futurism, which she experienced first-hand in Italy prior to the First World War. This side of her career, however, has received much less attention than her Cubist influences. This paper will trace and analyse Swanzy's relationship with Futurism, and will highlight the discernible influences of Futurism on her work. In addition, I shall situate in this paper Swanzy's relationship with Futurism within the context of the reception of the movement in Ireland. Avant-garde art movements were not particularly prominent in Ireland, a country more concerned with political than artistic concerns during the early twentieth century. Unlike Cubism, Futurism never made any significant inroads into Irish society. Cubist paintings were exhibited in Dublin in 1911 and 1912, but there was never a similar Futurist exhibition. Nonetheless, Futurism received a moderate amount of coverage in the Irish press, the characteristics of which will be analysed in this paper.
California Italian Studies. Special issue on Italian Sound , 2014
The aim of this article is to examine the Futurists’ understanding and interpretation of war nois... more The aim of this article is to examine the Futurists’ understanding and interpretation of war noises and sounds before, during and after their First World War combat experiences. Firstly, the article examines the Futurist interest in war noises prior to the outbreak of the First World War, secondly, it analyses the Futurists’ experience of war noises during their time in combat, focusing particularly on the figures of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, and Luigi Russolo. Finally, the article examines how the Futurist pre-war pronouncements on war noises offered them a ‘road map’ of how to behave in battle and provided them with successful strategies for coping with the intensity of life in the trenches.
Available for download at: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8fx1p115
Modern Italy, 2013
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s first experience of active combat was as a member of the Lombard Batt... more Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s first experience of active combat was as a member of the Lombard Battalion of Volunteer Cyclists and Motorists in the autumn of 1915, when he fought in the mountains of Trentino at the border of Italy and Austria-Hungary. This article examines his experience of mountain combat and how he communicated aspects of it both to specialist, Futurist audiences and to the general public and soldiers, through newspaper articles, manifestos, ‘words-in-freedom’ drawings, speeches and essays written between 1915 and 1917. Marinetti’s aim in all of these wartime writings was to gain maximum support for the Futurist movement. Thus, he adapted his views to suit his audience, at times highlighting the superiority of the Futurist volunteers over the Alpine soldiers and at others seeking to distance Futurism from middle-class intellectualism in order to appeal to the ordinary soldier. Marinetti interpreted the war’s relationship with the natural environment through an exclusively Futurist lens. He sought to ‘futurise’ the Alpine landscape in an effort to reconcile the urban and technophilic philosophy of his movement with the realities of combat in the isolated, rural and primitive mountains of Trentino.
The Language Learning Journal, Mar 2013
Employability is increasingly becoming a central aspect of higher education in the United Kingdom... more Employability is increasingly becoming a central aspect of higher education in the United Kingdom and it is becoming imperative that modern foreign languages teachers engage directly and sincerely with the employability agenda. This article proposes the use of feature films as a successful method for developing and promoting employability skills in the language classroom, an approach which has not thus far been adopted. I begin by discussing different models for the delivery of employability skills and I provide an overview of employability initiatives that have been undertaken by languages departments. The key issues of embedding versus stand-alone modules and the role of academics are addressed. While many employability initiatives focus on the development of transferable skills, I argue that the development of commercial awareness among undergraduate students has been neglected and that film is a suitable medium to rectify this. In the final section of the article, I provide some sample activities which use clips from feature films to develop employability skills at all levels of proficiency, focusing on linguistic competency and the development of commercial awareness.
Otto/Novecento. Special Issue on the Scapigliatura, Dec 2012
Nonostante frequenti riferimenti ai legami tra la Scapigliatura e il Futurismo, non esiste un lav... more Nonostante frequenti riferimenti ai legami tra la Scapigliatura e il Futurismo, non esiste un lavoro dettagliato sul rapporto tra i due movimenti in ambito letterario. Il presente articolo si occuperà di colmare questa lacuna tramite l’esplorazione del rapporto tra i protagonisti dei movimenti – Arrigo Boito e Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. L’analisi sarà incentrata sul periodo pre-futurista di Marinetti, in cui si delineavano l’ideologia e i metodi della sua avanguardia. Lo scopo di questo articolo è dunque quello di analizzare la natura del contatto e del rapporto tra i due scrittori tra il 1898 e il 1909, rivelando fonti primarie inedite. Particolare enfasi verrà data all’aspetto fondamentale che a mio avviso collega i due autori: la loro preoccupazione con il conflitto tra il Reale e l’Ideale; il dualismo normalmente associato con Boito ma che è anche un elemento sottovalutato dell’ideologia poetica del Marinetti pre-futurista.
Rivista di Studi Italiani, Jun 1, 2010
In this paper I examine how Filippo Tommaso Marinetti transformed his three-act drama Poupées Éle... more In this paper I examine how Filippo Tommaso Marinetti transformed his three-act drama Poupées Électriques (1909) into a one-act Futurist sintesi Elettricità (1913). Through the analysis of draft versions of Elettricità and of Futurist manifestos, both the process by which Marinetti enacted this textual transformation and the reasons behind the changes made to the French play in its passage to becoming an Italian playlet will be explored. A series of drafts for Elettricità, which are held at the F. T. Marinetti Papers Collection at the Beinecke Library, Yale University, uncover the progression from French original to Italian translation. Close textual analysis of the two plays will demonstrate how Marinetti sought to change elements of Poupées Électriques so that Elettricità would reflect his new Futurist world vision. The significance of many of the changes Marinetti made only becomes clear when Elettricità is contextualised within other developments in the Futurist ideology and to Marinetti’s manifesto output.
Book Chapters by Selena Daly
Guerra e Apocalisse, ed. Marco Mondini. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2016
Italy in the Era of the Great War, ed. Vanda Wilcox. Leiden: Brill, 2018
Back to the Futurists: The Avant-Garde and its Legacy, edited by Elza Adamowicz and Simona Storchi, 2013
The European Avant-Garde: Text and Image, edited by Selena Daly and Monica Insinga, 2012
Book Reviews by Selena Daly
Modern Italy , 2018
feature a need of 'extensive ego-feeling', Bartoloni posits the failure of the Italian Forum in S... more feature a need of 'extensive ego-feeling', Bartoloni posits the failure of the Italian Forum in Sydney, 'an imitation of the Italian square lifestyle', to recapture an idealised Italian culture. The idealisation of Italy is also the core of the last chapter. The Sicilia Outlet Villagea re-proposition of a traditional Sicilian villagestands as a fascinating yet perturbing physical representation of a dematerialised bond between the human and the non-human world. Objects are treated as simple props in a hyper-real experience of imaginary landscapes, feelings, sounds, and sensoriality. The need for replicas of real life triggers continuous relational distortions and perversions that fuel the anaesthetisation of reality commanded by economic desires.
Journal of Modern Italian Studies , 2016
Toronto: University of Toronto Press , Aug 2016
One of five non-fiction books shortlisted for The Bridge Book Prize 2017. This book is the fi... more One of five non-fiction books shortlisted for The Bridge Book Prize 2017.
This book is the first comprehensive study of Futurism during the First World War period. In this book, she examines the cultural, political, and military engagement of the Futurists with the war effort, both on the battlefields and on the home front.
Reviewed in Italian Studies, Annali d'Italianistica, Choice Reviews for Academic Librarians, and International Yearbook of Futurism Studies
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018
Italian Studies, 2019
The Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, built between 1865 and 1867, is the heart of the Lomb... more The Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, built between 1865 and 1867, is the heart of the Lombard capital. Giovanni Verga, a resident of the city for twenty years, was the Galleria’s most faithful and consistent chronicler in his Milanese short stories. While his contemporaries tended to portray the Galleria as a melting pot, Verga depicted it as home to two distinct categories of people: aspiring artists and fallen women. He employed these figures and the space of the Galleria as a means to reflect on and grapple with his anxieties about the changing position of women in late nineteenth-century Italian society. I argue that Verga chose to pathologise the space of the Galleria to warn ‘respectable’ women off and to maintain highly gendered conceptions of public and private realms. This article thus explores Verga’s representation of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II between 1875 and 1892, with an emphasis on the gendered dynamics of movement in this temple of consumerism.
Modern Language Notes, May 2016
Romance Studies, 2016
This paper establishes the mock-epic poem, Re Orso, by Arrigo Boito, first published in 1864, as ... more This paper establishes the mock-epic poem, Re Orso, by Arrigo Boito, first published in 1864, as an under-acknowledged source text for Le Roi Bombance, an important pre-Futurist play by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, first published in 1905. In so doing, Boito’s legacy to twentieth-century Italian modernism is asserted, a standing often denied to him. In addition, the debt Marinetti owed to nineteenth-century Italian literature is also established, a point often neglected due to the fact that Marinetti wrote exclusively in French between 1899 and 1912. A new interpretation of the philosophy of Re Orso is offered, which argues that a rejection of anthropocentrism constitutes the poem’s central message. The paper demonstrates how Le Roi Bombance built on the ideas put forward in Re Orso, and how Marinetti would subsequently establish a rejection of the anthropocentric system as an important element of his Futurist theory of literature, following the launch of the Futurist movement in 1909.
Annali d'Italianistica. Special issue on The Great War and the Modernist Imagination, eds. Luca Somigli and Simona Storchi, Sep 2015
International Yearbook of Futurism Studies. Special issue on Women Futurists, 2015
Mary Swanzy was an important Irish avant-garde painter of the early twentieth century. She studie... more Mary Swanzy was an important Irish avant-garde painter of the early twentieth century. She studied in Paris for a time and is noted for her Cubist-inspired paintings. However, her œuvre also shows influences of Futurism, which she experienced first-hand in Italy prior to the First World War. This side of her career, however, has received much less attention than her Cubist influences. This paper will trace and analyse Swanzy's relationship with Futurism, and will highlight the discernible influences of Futurism on her work. In addition, I shall situate in this paper Swanzy's relationship with Futurism within the context of the reception of the movement in Ireland. Avant-garde art movements were not particularly prominent in Ireland, a country more concerned with political than artistic concerns during the early twentieth century. Unlike Cubism, Futurism never made any significant inroads into Irish society. Cubist paintings were exhibited in Dublin in 1911 and 1912, but there was never a similar Futurist exhibition. Nonetheless, Futurism received a moderate amount of coverage in the Irish press, the characteristics of which will be analysed in this paper.
California Italian Studies. Special issue on Italian Sound , 2014
The aim of this article is to examine the Futurists’ understanding and interpretation of war nois... more The aim of this article is to examine the Futurists’ understanding and interpretation of war noises and sounds before, during and after their First World War combat experiences. Firstly, the article examines the Futurist interest in war noises prior to the outbreak of the First World War, secondly, it analyses the Futurists’ experience of war noises during their time in combat, focusing particularly on the figures of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, and Luigi Russolo. Finally, the article examines how the Futurist pre-war pronouncements on war noises offered them a ‘road map’ of how to behave in battle and provided them with successful strategies for coping with the intensity of life in the trenches.
Available for download at: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8fx1p115
Modern Italy, 2013
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s first experience of active combat was as a member of the Lombard Batt... more Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s first experience of active combat was as a member of the Lombard Battalion of Volunteer Cyclists and Motorists in the autumn of 1915, when he fought in the mountains of Trentino at the border of Italy and Austria-Hungary. This article examines his experience of mountain combat and how he communicated aspects of it both to specialist, Futurist audiences and to the general public and soldiers, through newspaper articles, manifestos, ‘words-in-freedom’ drawings, speeches and essays written between 1915 and 1917. Marinetti’s aim in all of these wartime writings was to gain maximum support for the Futurist movement. Thus, he adapted his views to suit his audience, at times highlighting the superiority of the Futurist volunteers over the Alpine soldiers and at others seeking to distance Futurism from middle-class intellectualism in order to appeal to the ordinary soldier. Marinetti interpreted the war’s relationship with the natural environment through an exclusively Futurist lens. He sought to ‘futurise’ the Alpine landscape in an effort to reconcile the urban and technophilic philosophy of his movement with the realities of combat in the isolated, rural and primitive mountains of Trentino.
The Language Learning Journal, Mar 2013
Employability is increasingly becoming a central aspect of higher education in the United Kingdom... more Employability is increasingly becoming a central aspect of higher education in the United Kingdom and it is becoming imperative that modern foreign languages teachers engage directly and sincerely with the employability agenda. This article proposes the use of feature films as a successful method for developing and promoting employability skills in the language classroom, an approach which has not thus far been adopted. I begin by discussing different models for the delivery of employability skills and I provide an overview of employability initiatives that have been undertaken by languages departments. The key issues of embedding versus stand-alone modules and the role of academics are addressed. While many employability initiatives focus on the development of transferable skills, I argue that the development of commercial awareness among undergraduate students has been neglected and that film is a suitable medium to rectify this. In the final section of the article, I provide some sample activities which use clips from feature films to develop employability skills at all levels of proficiency, focusing on linguistic competency and the development of commercial awareness.
Otto/Novecento. Special Issue on the Scapigliatura, Dec 2012
Nonostante frequenti riferimenti ai legami tra la Scapigliatura e il Futurismo, non esiste un lav... more Nonostante frequenti riferimenti ai legami tra la Scapigliatura e il Futurismo, non esiste un lavoro dettagliato sul rapporto tra i due movimenti in ambito letterario. Il presente articolo si occuperà di colmare questa lacuna tramite l’esplorazione del rapporto tra i protagonisti dei movimenti – Arrigo Boito e Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. L’analisi sarà incentrata sul periodo pre-futurista di Marinetti, in cui si delineavano l’ideologia e i metodi della sua avanguardia. Lo scopo di questo articolo è dunque quello di analizzare la natura del contatto e del rapporto tra i due scrittori tra il 1898 e il 1909, rivelando fonti primarie inedite. Particolare enfasi verrà data all’aspetto fondamentale che a mio avviso collega i due autori: la loro preoccupazione con il conflitto tra il Reale e l’Ideale; il dualismo normalmente associato con Boito ma che è anche un elemento sottovalutato dell’ideologia poetica del Marinetti pre-futurista.
Rivista di Studi Italiani, Jun 1, 2010
In this paper I examine how Filippo Tommaso Marinetti transformed his three-act drama Poupées Éle... more In this paper I examine how Filippo Tommaso Marinetti transformed his three-act drama Poupées Électriques (1909) into a one-act Futurist sintesi Elettricità (1913). Through the analysis of draft versions of Elettricità and of Futurist manifestos, both the process by which Marinetti enacted this textual transformation and the reasons behind the changes made to the French play in its passage to becoming an Italian playlet will be explored. A series of drafts for Elettricità, which are held at the F. T. Marinetti Papers Collection at the Beinecke Library, Yale University, uncover the progression from French original to Italian translation. Close textual analysis of the two plays will demonstrate how Marinetti sought to change elements of Poupées Électriques so that Elettricità would reflect his new Futurist world vision. The significance of many of the changes Marinetti made only becomes clear when Elettricità is contextualised within other developments in the Futurist ideology and to Marinetti’s manifesto output.
Guerra e Apocalisse, ed. Marco Mondini. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2016
Italy in the Era of the Great War, ed. Vanda Wilcox. Leiden: Brill, 2018
Back to the Futurists: The Avant-Garde and its Legacy, edited by Elza Adamowicz and Simona Storchi, 2013
The European Avant-Garde: Text and Image, edited by Selena Daly and Monica Insinga, 2012
Modern Italy , 2018
feature a need of 'extensive ego-feeling', Bartoloni posits the failure of the Italian Forum in S... more feature a need of 'extensive ego-feeling', Bartoloni posits the failure of the Italian Forum in Sydney, 'an imitation of the Italian square lifestyle', to recapture an idealised Italian culture. The idealisation of Italy is also the core of the last chapter. The Sicilia Outlet Villagea re-proposition of a traditional Sicilian villagestands as a fascinating yet perturbing physical representation of a dematerialised bond between the human and the non-human world. Objects are treated as simple props in a hyper-real experience of imaginary landscapes, feelings, sounds, and sensoriality. The need for replicas of real life triggers continuous relational distortions and perversions that fuel the anaesthetisation of reality commanded by economic desires.
Journal of Modern Italian Studies , 2016
The European Legacy: Towards New Paradigms (Special Issue: Italian Futurism between Tradition and Modernization), 2009
Annali d’Italianistica, Vol 27, (A Century of Futurism 1909-2009), 2009
Call for Papers: “Dictators and Degenerates: Modernism, Fascism and the Pursuit of Culture” Even... more Call for Papers:
“Dictators and Degenerates: Modernism, Fascism and the Pursuit of Culture”
Event: 15-16 September 2017
Abstract due date: 1 March 2017
Keynote Speaker: Prof. Sascha Bru (Dept. of Literary Theory & Cultural Studies, KU Leuven)