This chapter examines the reception of romance in medieval Italy, focusing on the way in which Italian writers engaged with the form and content of the genre. It examines different modes of adaptation through the lens of three texts from different Italian-speaking communities and time periods. Firstly, the Franco-Venetian Prophecies de Merlin demonstrates the hybrid character of Italian romance, which combines French and Italian language and perspectives -- in this case, to incorporate Italian interests in political prophecy into the Arthurian story. The Tuscan Tavola Ritonda characterizes Italian-vernacular adaptations of French prose cycles, combining ideals of chivalric heroism with civic values to resignify Tristan’s status as the perfect knight. Finally, the late medieval Ferrarese L’Inamoramento de Orlando by Matteo Maria Boiardo draws on the Italian cantari in its incorporation of romance themes and forms alongside chanson de geste. Italian medieval romance emerges as a malleable and porous genre that is always in dialogue with other genres and cultural perspectives.

Chapter 5, “The Children of Others in Woolf,” begins by acknowledging an obvious truth: no English writer is more famous for not having children than Virginia Woolf. There can be little doubt that this is because she was a woman. But critics noting Woolf’s experience of childlessness have never made much of an effort to explain why this matters for her books. It matters a lot, for Woolf returned throughout her novels to the representation of contradictory sentiments toward the question of having children. Masterpieces like To the Lighthouse and The Waves thrum with competing expressions of yearning and distaste. The late novel The Years is explicit about the ugliness of parents’ overvaluation of their own children. Woolf’s short fiction is no less complex on this theme: “A Society” imagines a birth strike by women, while “Lappin and Lapinova” dramatizes the privations of childlessness. Woolf’s novels proposed a recurring resolution of the tension between fecundity and austerity: children were to be included in the purview of fiction, but ideally at a necessary distance, as the offspring of other people.

During the last half of the war each of the European powers experienced a serious crisis on its home front. Britain resorted to conscription and suppressed a rebellion in Ireland. In both France and Italy, morale wavered when the army suffered mutiny and defeat. In Germany, the militarization of the home front under the Hindenburg Program coincided with the struggle to feed the civilian population during the “turnip winter.” Meanwhile, the death of Francis Joseph accelerated revolutionary thinking among the nationalities of Austria-Hungary. Amid growing sentiment for peace on the European home fronts, the international socialist movement held a peace conference at Stockholm which attracted more participants than the earlier effort at Zimmerwald but was just as fruitless. In the last half of the war strong civilian leaders emerged to rally the home front in each of the leading European Allies – Lloyd George in Britain, Clemenceau in France, and Orlando in Italy – while in the United States, Wilson’s ideals lent a veneer of unity to a degree of domestic upheaval not seen since the American Civil War. Women’s contributions to the war effort bolstered the cause of women’s suffrage, with Britain granting it in March 1918, to take effect in the first postwar elections.

The sixth chapter, “Gray Modernism,” argues that modernist experimentation with narrative form draws theoretical and disciplinary inspiration from the invention of gerontology and geriatrics as a science. During the twentieth century, aging becomes the subject of clinical interest, a temporal pathology detachable from the body it affects. Similarly, for modernist novels like Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, duration becomes separable from the highly charged aesthetic moments it contains. Though Orlando lives through many centuries, she does not grow old; instead, her greatest transformation occurs when her gender instantaneously switches from male to female. The novel creates a divide between the systems of duration and aging on the one hand, and the momentariness and constructedness of identity on the other. By breaking with the conventions that link duration and objective, shared time, Woolf situates aging in an ironic temporality that disrupts the forward press of years.