John Champagne is an Associate Professor of English at Penn State Erie, the Behrend College, and a Visiting Professor of Communications at John Cabot University, Rome. He writes on gender and sexuality in modern culture; a critic and novelist, he is the author of three previous books.

Aesthetic Modernism and Masculinity in Fascist Italy is an interdisciplinary historical re-reading of a series of representative texts that complicate our current understanding of the portrayal of masculinity in the Italian fascist era.

Champagne seeks to evaluate how the aesthetic analysis of the artifacts explored offer a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of what world politics is, what is at stake when something - like masculinity - is rendered as being an element of world politics, and how such an understanding differs from more orthodox 'cultural' analyses common to international relations.

Introduction: Beyond Virility, Chapter 1. Fascism, Modernism, and the Contradictions of Capitalism, Chapter 2. Pirandello Fascista? Modernism and The Theater of Masculinity Chapter 3. The Dandy, the Mystic, and the Tonalists: Italian Modernist Painting and the Male Body Chapter 4. "A Glimpse Through an Interstice Caught: Fascism and Mario Castelnuovo-Tedescos Calamus Songs" Chapter 5. Giorgio Bassani and Italian "Queers" of the 1930s" Conclusion: "Beyond" Fascism?