ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the recurrent call to heroism that appears so often and so openly in children's books from Cuore through the First World War. By the outbreak of the First World War, Giuseppe Garibaldi's image had become so pervasive in children's literature that his name could be used as an adverb. The use of animals in similes and other figures of speech can serve various purposes in a children's book. The construction of the myth of Garibaldi in post-unification children's literature encoded Italian ambivalences about modernity and served as a strategy to guide and to fuse personal and national maturation. Changes in the modes of production were sending women out of the home and into the factories, particularly in northern Italy, where most of the writers and publishing houses of children's literature were located.
