This thesis focuses on the representations of the city in the early twentieth-century literary works of two groups of Italian writers: the crepuscolari and the vociani. My analysis shows how the theme of the city is deeply connected with the conception of modernity of these authors. In particular, I focus, case by case, on the ways in which the representation of the the urbs (the physical city) reflects different approaches to the multifaceted modem civitas (understood as society, and sometimes more broadly as human companionship). . The quality of the urban depictions also appears to be linked to the different ways in which the authors conceived of the role and the value of poetry within the new capitalist society. The authors are analysed separately. This allows me to focus not only on the shared aspects of their approach to the city, but also on the autonomous developments of their poetics in this respect. The characteristics ofthe lyrical ios and their relationships with both the Other and temporality emerge as key parameters, in order to understand the significance of the city within the broader system of poetic objects of each writer. The Introduction addresses methodological issues. Chapters 1 and 2, which constitute the first part, provide a socio-economic; and a cultural and literary framework respectively. Chapter 2 also introduces the collective poetics of the vociani and the crepuscolari, and analyses the urban representations ofD'Annunzio, an important model for both groups. In the second part (Chapters 3 to 7), I analyse the urban poetics in the works of Fausto Maria Martini, Sergio Corazzini, Corrado Govoni, Guido Gozzano, Marino Moretti, Aldo Palazzeschi, Camillo Sbarbaro, Clemente Rebora, Giovanni Boine, Umberto Saba and Scipio Slataper.

The present work argues that the Italian neo-avant-garde’s understanding and expression of the social value of formalised language and literariness is to be closely related to Modernist and Avant-gardist cultural dynamics, and not to a Post-modernist regime of cultural values. Chapter 1 presents the Italian neo-avant-garde as a phenomenon to be posited within the scenario of the changing role of the humanist intellectual in 50s and 60s Italy. Avant-garde art as a notion and tradition is tackled through Bürger and Bourdieu’s theorisations. Chapter 2 focuses on how Italian Futurism disproves any idealistic notion of avant-garde art as good political praxis. It also explores the rhetorical codifications of the avant-garde’s self-mythologizing discursive practices through the analysis of the Futurists’ use and appropriation of the genre of the manifesto. Chapter 3 analyses the neo-avant-garde’s corpus of theoretical writing and shows that, despite the fact they did not write a proper manifesto, the rhetorical codifications of the avant-garde’s self-reflexive discourse are still present in their individually written texts. Chapter 4 frames the Italian neo-avant-garde within the broader framework of the historical avant-garde while highlighting their use of and relationship with science and scientific discourse, especially in Eco’s works. Chapter 5 is a lengthy analysis of the use of the technique of the montage in <i>poesia novissima</i>. It carries out a critical comparison between the discursive, ideology-oriented and anti-hedonistic use of <i>montaged </i>linguistic material characterising the experimentalism of the <i>Novissimi</i> and the iconic use of language characterising the multimediatic experiments of <i>poesia totale</i>, concrete poetry and technological poetry. The conclusion highlights the modalities, or in Bourdieu’s terms, the <i>distinction marks</i>, by which the Italian neo-avant-garde challenges, appropriates, changes and finally <i>performs</i> the practice of avant-garde art as truly innovative art.

This thesis deals with the work of Pier Vittorio Tondelli (1955-91) and concerns the way in which the greater permeability of cultural borders and speed of information exchanges affects the production of contemporary fiction and makes national literatures open to permeation by other cultures. Tondelli provides in this respect an interesting case study since his works display a particular bent for hybridization, both of language and content. This thesis examines his literary and non-literary production, paying particular attention to intertextual and intercultural relations and to questions of cultural and virtual space. In contrast to the existing critical tradition on Tondelli it devotes equal attention to style and content. Fifteen years after Tondelli's death it is time for a different approach to his work in particular it is important to read it through an intertextual perspective. Through a close textual analysis of his works, regarded as a complex patchwork of references (including film and music as well as literature), I intend to determine a typology of the different relations he established with his models in different texts and at different stages of his career. The contextualization of these relations and the analysis of certain recurrent narrative themes, such as separation and the journey, offers a new perspective on Tondelli's works. The thesis is divided into four chapters. The first introduces two theories postmodernism and intertextuality that are central in the analysis of Tondelli's fiction. It also presents the literary production of Alberto Arbasino as a major influence on his works. The other three chapters focus on Tondelli's principal works of fiction.

The purpose of this study is that of pointing out a linguistic approach to the analysis of Montale's poems and their spatio-temporal, inter-personal, stylistic and thematic dissolution. In the first four chapters attention will be centred on understanding what is deixis and on analyzing the deictic organization in Montale's texts. Through such an analysis it will be possible to prove that Montale's poems project worlds of poetry that can be re-inhabited linguistically in order to study their spatio-temporal co-ordinates and their opening to a zone which will be referred to as <i>limen</i> and which functions as the door-passage to the metaphysical dimension and, thus, to a dissolution of the traditional three-dimensional concepts of space and time. The study of deixis will also help us understand the dynamics of the relationship between voices and narratorial roles within such poetic worlds. In the last three chapters, the examination of Montale's language from the point of view of heteroglossia shows us that the attempt to create a unifying poetic language that may lead to a truthful reading of reality fails. The traditional poetic present in Montale's poetry of the first three collections slowly opens to the unofficial language of the street and the marketplace. It will be claimed that the more monological language, which characterizes Montale's first three books, dissolves so as to embrace a different variety of available social languages in order to express disintegration of a society, of a tradition and, partly, of the poet's ideology through social and self satire.

This study seeks to explore the relationsh~ between the short story/racconto genre and the negative representation of the character in Italian modernist literatufe. In the first chapter, considerations regarding the crisis at the tum ofthe twentieth century and the concept and development ofthe Italian racconto are investigated, with the purpose ofhighlighting modernist features within Italian literature around and prior to the 1930s, the time in which my selected authors (Bontempelli, Gadda, Landolfi and Palazzeschi) were writing. Subsequently, the notion ofantihero within these writers' selected raccolte di racconti is explored: the character emerges as an inetto, an essentially negative creature, bearing the signs ofEuropean modernism. These features (alienation, solitude, social anomaly, melancholy, dissolution ofselfhood, anguish, fragmentation) are then considered in the following four chapters, each one dedicated to one author. For each author, the issue of character representation is explored in relation to a different conception ofracconto writing. Bontempelli's objective approach, Gadda's and Landolfi's subjective approaches, and Palazzeschi's return to objectivity are discussed together in the conclusion, where a mapping ofthe negative modernist character is attempted, ultimately revealing, through Palazzeschi's buffo, an unexpected, positive outcome to the problematic representation ofthe modernist antihero.