The Struggle for Life and the Modern Italian Novel, 1859-1925

This book explores Darwinism in modern Italian literature. In the years between Italy’s unification (1861) and the rise of fascism, many writers gave voice to anxieties connected with the ideas of evolution and progress. This study shows how Italian authors borrowed and reworked a scientific vocabulary to write about the contradictions and the contrasting tensions of Italy’s cultural and political-economic modernization. It focuses, above all, on novels by Italo Svevo, Federico De Roberto and Luigi Pirandello. The analysis centers on such topics as the struggle against adverse social conditions in capitalistic society, the risk of failing to survive the struggle itself, the adaptive issues of individuals uprooted from their family and work environments, the concerns about the heredity of maladapted characters. Accordingly, the book also argues that the hybridization and variation of both narrative forms and collective mindsets describes the modernist awareness of the cultural complexity experienced in Italy and Europe at this time.

 

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The Struggle for Life and the Modern Italian Novel, 1859-1925

This book explores Darwinism in modern Italian literature. In the years between Italy’s unification (1861) and the rise of fascism, many writers gave voice to anxieties connected with the ideas of evolution and progress. This study shows how Italian authors borrowed and reworked a scientific vocabulary to write about the contradictions and the contrasting tensions of Italy’s cultural and political-economic modernization. It focuses, above all, on novels by Italo Svevo, Federico De Roberto and Luigi Pirandello. The analysis centers on such topics as the struggle against adverse social conditions in capitalistic society, the risk of failing to survive the struggle itself, the adaptive issues of individuals uprooted from their family and work environments, the concerns about the heredity of maladapted characters. Accordingly, the book also argues that the hybridization and variation of both narrative forms and collective mindsets describes the modernist awareness of the cultural complexity experienced in Italy and Europe at this time.

 

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The Struggle for Life and the Modern Italian Novel, 1859-1925

The Struggle for Life and the Modern Italian Novel, 1859-1925

by Andrea Sartori
The Struggle for Life and the Modern Italian Novel, 1859-1925
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The Struggle for Life and the Modern Italian Novel, 1859-1925

The Struggle for Life and the Modern Italian Novel, 1859-1925

by Andrea Sartori

Overview

This book explores Darwinism in modern Italian literature. In the years between Italy’s unification (1861) and the rise of fascism, many writers gave voice to anxieties connected with the ideas of evolution and progress. This study shows how Italian authors borrowed and reworked a scientific vocabulary to write about the contradictions and the contrasting tensions of Italy’s cultural and political-economic modernization. It focuses, above all, on novels by Italo Svevo, Federico De Roberto and Luigi Pirandello. The analysis centers on such topics as the struggle against adverse social conditions in capitalistic society, the risk of failing to survive the struggle itself, the adaptive issues of individuals uprooted from their family and work environments, the concerns about the heredity of maladapted characters. Accordingly, the book also argues that the hybridization and variation of both narrative forms and collective mindsets describes the modernist awareness of the cultural complexity experienced in Italy and Europe at this time.

 

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9783031188503
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Publication date: 11/22/2022
Series: Italian and Italian American Studies
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
File size: 681 KB

About the Author

Andrea Sartori teaches Italian and European Culture at Politecnico of Milan, Italy, for the year 2022-23. He is the author of Scompenso (2010) and L’inventalavoro (2012). He co-edited Perspectives on Italian Difference: Italian Differences in Perspective (2018) and Terry Pinkard’s La Fenomenologia di Hegel in Italian (2013). 


Table of Contents

1 Introduction.- 2 Darwin’s Traces.- 3 Svevo: Life and Writing.- 4 De Roberto: Power and Transformism.- 5 Pirandello: Name and Performance.- 6 Conclusion.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Andrea Sartori’s book brilliantly illuminates the anxiety of modernization at the outset of the 20th Century, setting out his powerful and thorough analysis of the relationships between Darwin’s innovation in biology and the modern Italian novel, and showing the importance fiction and stories can have as they express, fictionalize and elaborate the negativity of the ‘morbid symptoms’ which still encompasses our ‘struggle for life’ today. This book is an important reading.”

—Lin Yang, Nankai University

“The Struggle for Life and the Modern Italian Novel offers a fresh and valuable new lens for understanding the development of Italian literature in the wake of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Andrea Sartori balances a complex set of factors in this rich treatment of Italian modernity, examining the reception of scientific theory, social and cultural history, political transformations, and the formation and development of modernist literaturein response to the anxieties encapsulated by ‘the struggle for life’ in a rapidly changing world.”

—Michael Subialka, University of California, Davis

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