The Fin de siècle Cultural Watershed in Gabriele d’Annunzio’s Novels

In my dissertation, I analysed Gabriele d’Annunzio’s answer to the fin de siècle crisis from Terra vergine to the end of Romanzi della rosa (Il Piacere, L’Innocente, Trionfo della morte), including Giovanni Episcopo, which along with L’Innocente is an expression of the so-called Slavic phase. Analysing this diegetic trajectory, I enhanced the emerging narrative of modernist thematic threads, which in my opinion have always been neglected by Italian literary criticism. Following d’Annunzio’s prose from 1882 (Terra vergine) to 1894 (Trionfo della morte), I highlighted how the writer thematized the concept of modern subjectivity, ingrained in all his characters, included some in Terra vergine, unanimously considered the most Verghian style of his works. In my analysis, I shed a new light on the interpretation of d’Annunzio’s first novels, showing how they mark the beginning of the new literary era, as they anticipate Modernism. All his characters, in fact, are alienated and fragmented subjects, who become a specimen of the modernist type, the so-called inept at living, who embodies the epistemological crisis of the fin de siècle. Starting with Il Piacere, d’Annunzio’s novels hinge on the protagonists’ interiority, undermining the role of the traditional plot and featuring the subjectification of time, which is the main modernist feature in d’Annunzio’s work. Although on the surface some of these novels still abide by the deterministic logic inherent in events, time is conceived as an existential enviroment, based on the protagonists’ recollection of events rather than on the chronological sequence of facts. Another element of novelty is the theme of the doubles, most evident in L’Innocente, which creates an allocentric system for all the characters. Trionfo della Morte reaches a new level of time abstraction and psychological analysis. As ominously hinted in the title, the novel’s tragic ending deploys the triumph of Thànatos over the protagonist’s quest for a vital force to cling on. The end of the novel thus symbolizes the closure of a narrative cycle, started in Terra vergine with the death of Dalfino, the first Dannunzian character to rip the sky of the positivistic certainties and see a hint of a Pirandellian oltre.

Department dc:contributor.department

Italian Studies

Year dc:date.issued

2022

Author dc:creator

• Tesi, Letizia

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Guardiani, Francesco
• Somigli, Luca

• d'Annunzio
• fin de siecle
• il piacere
• l'innocente
• Modernism
• trionfo della morte

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1807/123311

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:utoronto.scholaris.ca:1807/123311