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This thesis explores the function of literary genres in the production and reception of the literary text, examines the ideological significance of the generic system operative in postwar Italy, and analyzes the five novels written by Italo Calvino from 1950 to 1963. The emphasis is on the relationship between the author's ethico-political stance and his negotiations of the generic system. The first part of the study (Chapters I--III) develops the theoretical tools and historical parameters which are applied to the textual analyses carried out in the second part (Chapters IV--VII). In Chapter I the notion of literariness is examined against the background of recent criticism. The distinctiveness of the literary text is found to reside in the cognitive performance it makes possible. This performance is then analyzed relying on the categories of sense and reference developed by the theory of Possible Worlds. This leads to an examination of two strategies---realist and non-realist---for the articulation of reference, which in turn raises the issue of the role of literary genres in the dialogical interaction mediated by the text. The second chapter focuses on the producer of the text. A connection is established between the epistemic configuration of "modernity" and the emergence of a particular type of producer, namely the "intellectual," who is also the primary interlocutor of "modern" literature. This analysis is then brought to bear, via Gramsci, on the particular situation of twentieth-century intellectuals in Italy. The third chapter provides a panorama of postwar Italy, with an emphasis on the relationship between political events and cultural developments such as the emergence of neorealism as the dominant literary current. The chapters in the second part present a reading of the five novels written by Calvino between 1950 and 1963, namely: I giovani del Po, Il visconte dimezzato, Il barone rampante, Il cavaliere inesistente, and La giornata d'uno scrutatore.

Staliniana is an eclectic genre of Russian literature of the Soviet period. It deals with the fictional image of I. V. Stalin and the impact of his life and politics on history. For several decades it was the core of socialist realist literature and Stalin's personality cult. / The first chapter discusses the phenomena of Stalin's personality cult in the context of the intellectual history of the post-revolutionary Soviet society in the 1920s and 1930s. Chapter two offers different classifications of a vast amount of fiction written on Stalin. The genesis and documented development of staliniana is discussed in the third chapter. Special attention is paid to the manipulations in the genre exercised by ideological and cultural authorities in the USSR from the 1920s to the 1970s. The fourth chapter discusses some aspects of staliniana in Western Europe as contrasted to Soviet literature. In the fifth chapter a detailed analysis of key elements of the codified literary image of Stalin is undertaken. Chapter six explores the folklore background of Stalin's cult and its interaction with the cult of V. I. Lenin. The final chapter offers an analysis of the development of the language used by Stalin as a fictional character in works of literature. This study uses the recently declassified materials from Soviet archives in order to demonstrate that staliniana was not only a key element of the Stalin cult but also a cornerstone of Soviet literature.

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