Il mondo nuovo del romanzo: 1900-1925

In the early decades of the twentieth century, five authors hailing from the cultural margins of three literary traditions built on national languages (English, Italian, and German) injected new creative potential into European literature. Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), Italo Svevo (1861-1928), Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936), James Joyce (1882-1941), and Franz Kafka (1883-1924), the essay argues, all contributed to the creation of a corpus which is here defined through the spatial image of a “new world of the novel”. Thanks to new cartographical tools (such as those Mikhail Bakhtin evolved from the study of Dostoevsky) we are able to appreciate to what extent their ex-centric points of view gave representation to a polyphonic ‘European’ experience previously overshadowed by the centre-periphery polarity enforced trough value hierarchies associated with the nineteenth-century predominance of the British and French editorial markets. In the postwar years, artistic avant-gardes succeeded in reverting this polarity at a time when (in places like Geneva, Prague, Moscow) new disciplines such linguistics and literary theory were changing the intellectual map of Europe. These five authors’ repeated delinking and reconfiguring of languages and cultures remain important not only because of their multifaceted answers to the many challenges the art of literature was facing in that period of European history but because their texts remain today a privileged terrain in view of a general rethinking of way to apply those theories to the study of the novel.