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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Landscapes of War in Edward Ardizzone’s Illustrated Diaries. The Political and Pictorial Landscapes of WWII

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My research is focused on Edward Ardizzone’s WWII war-scapes, more precisely his detailed textual descriptions and pictorial representations (sketches and water wash images) introduced in the illustrated manuscripts of his diaries (1943-45) and the published edition of this autobiographical narrative: Diary of a War Artist (1974). Using an interdisciplinary perspective, my research is aimed at identifying the textual and visual strategies explored by Ardizzone to describe within his illustrated diaries his subjective experiences of war. As I discovered through my research in Ardizzone’s archives at the Imperial War Museum in London, his written testimonials of what he witnessed during WWII, as he accompanied the British Army as a commissioned artist for the WAAC, are often more explicit than the hundreds of beautifully executed sketches and watercolors which punctuate his diaries. The forces at the heart of my research are the inexhaustible variety of human experiences and the specificity of WWII war-scapes represented in Ardizzone’s narrative and pictorial testimonials.