Intro -- 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
Summary:
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 Italys cultural and politicaleconomic 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 a capitalist society; the risk of failing to survive the struggle itself; the adaptive issues of individuals uprooted from their family and work environments; and the concerns about the heritability of maladaptive characteristics. 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. Andrea Sartori teaches Italian and European Culture at Politecnico of Milan, Italy, for the year 202223. He is the author of Scompenso (2010) and Linventalavoro (2012). He co-edited Perspectives on Italian Difference: Italian Differences in Perspective (2018) and Terry Pinkards La Fenomenologia di Hegel in Italian (2013).
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.