Fascism, Aviation and Mythical Modernity

Flying and the pilot were significant metaphors of fascism's mythical modernity. Fernando Esposito traces the changing meanings of these highly charged symbols from the 1909 air show in Brescia, to the sky above the trenches of the First World War to the violent ideological clashes of the interwar period. The book analyzes a multitude of speakers in the aviation discourse ranging from Aby Warburg and Gabriele D'Annunzio, over the Futurists and Ernst Jünger to the Fascists proper. Esposito shows how the flyer came to symbolize not only New Man and the new eternal time the Fascists were striving for but also the conflicts underlying modernity itself.