5 - Italy

Summary

In order to outline a history of Italian modernism, we must begin with a reflection on the category of modernism itself, which in recent years has substantially broadened its scope. From a term indicating a particular moment in Anglo-American literature (what we might now call “high modernism”), modernism has grown into a period label encompassing much of Western literature from the middle of the nineteenth century to the Second World War. This re-interpretation has tended to privilege the northern Paris-London-Berlin-Moscow axis, as in the case, for instance, of the critical anthology edited by Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, arguably the key text in redefining the boundaries of modernism. At the same time, as a historiographic category, modernism has played a very minor role in the Italian critical debate. The question with which we might begin, then, is to ask precisely what is at stake for Italian literature in the appropriation of modernism. I should point out that this is not a peculiarly Italian problem. Indeed, as Edward Możejko has argued in a recent essay, the “internationalization” of modernism as a term - its increased adoption on the part of critical traditions to which it was, until recently, foreign - entails a continuous process of redefinition of its meaning and implications.