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.
Author(s): Andrea Sartori
Series: Italian and Italian American Studies
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 277
City: Cham
Acknowledgments
Praise for The Struggle for Life and the Modern Italian Novel, 1859–1925
Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction: The Anxiety of Modernization
Chapter 2: Darwin’s Traces
1 Struggle for Life: The Origin of a Metaphor
2 Derrida and Darwin
3 Darwin Contended: A Literary Perspective
4 In Italy: Fogazzaro, D’Annunzio, Verga, Pascoli
Chapter 3: Svevo: (A) Life and Writing
1 December, 1902
2 Adaptive Demands
3 A Solitary Performance
4 The Struggle for Life and Woman
5 An Emotional Void
6 An Indelible Trace: Images of Deprivation
7 Delirium and Writing
Chapter 4: De Roberto: Power and Transformism
1 Zola: The Features of a Dream
2 De Roberto: Writing about Negativity
3 De Roberto: The Viceroys
3.1 A Fading Inheritance
3.2 Suggestion: From Family to Politics
3.3 Final Curtain: The Unpredictable
Chapter 5: Pirandello: Name and Performance
1 Copernicus and Darwin
2 The Late Mattia Pascal: Is There Any Logic?
3 One, No One and One Hundred Thousand: Getting Under the Skin
4 Six Characters in Search of an Author: A Tale of Shame
Chapter 6: Conclusion
Works Cited
Author Index
Subject Index
