Effetto Sud Il Mezzogiorno degli scrittori meridionali Verga, d’Annunzio, Deledda, Silone, Ortese

The South has long been the shadow and mirror of the North. And this is true for Southern Italy as well as for what we now call the global South and what we used to call the Third World, i.e. that part of the planet which, during the 19th and 20th centuries, was colonized by the European and American West. This "coincidence" has meant that, in the analysis of this phenomenon on a cultural level, the same categories have been used in both cases: categories coined in the process of decolonization and tested on the artistic-literary production of former colonial countries. The advantage of applying "postcolonial methodology" to the culture of Southern Italy, however, immediately showed its downside: it supported the most radical and questionable hypotheses of the Risorgimento revisionism, i.e. the interpretation of national unification as an internal colonization to the detriment of the South. Sometimes the support of this hypothesis was due to the positions expressed by writers themselves, other times, however, the methodological approach determined the outcome of the analysis. Hence the need, which this thesis seeks to fill, to find new categories to analyze the effect produced by the mirroring of the North on the South of Italy. In order to do this, we focused our attention mainly on culture: as we explain at length in the first chapter of the research, we based our analysis on Jurij Lotman's semiotic-cultural approach, and integrated it with the contribution of other "theories of difference". In this way we have developed an analytical paradigm through which to investigate the works of southern writers and the elements they have in common. The latter, in our opinion, are the product of the "dialogue" that has been established between the two parts of the country since the Unity and, observed as a whole, are able to outline a genealogy, if not a real literary tradition of Mezzogiorno; where, with the word ‘Mezzogiorno’, we intend to refer to those regions of the South that the central-nation, with such a term, has intended to stigmatize and that have then appropriated such a term to claim the autonomy of their own representation. It appears evident that such an analysis acquires value with the enlargement of the casuistry and of the comparisons, and in this sense our thesis wants to be only a starting point of a wider research. Here, in fact, we have chosen to limit the investigation to a rather limited number of authors on which to test the validity of our methodological approach, without neglecting the exegetical study of literary productions and poetics in their diachronic evolution. The choice of the corpus, in part inevitably arbitrary, was therefore based on the elements of commonality found among the writers, but also took into account a certain territorial and genre representativeness. The thesis is structured in seven chapters: an introductory chapter in which the problem and the methodology are presented, is followed by a second chapter focused on the debate concerning the othering image of Southern Italy and aimed at summarizing the critical issues raised so far and often left unresolved. The following chapters are dedicated to the five authors: starting from some biographical elements important to understand their relationship with the South, the discussion proceeds with the analysis of the works linked to the region they belong to and finds its completion in the accurate examination of one work in particular. With regard to Giovanni Verga, the research begins with some of the novellas contained in the collections Primavera e altri racconti, Vita dei campi and Novelle rusticane and then focuses on the analysis of the Malavoglia. For Gabriele d’Annunzio, we briefly analyze the debut novella collection, Terra vergine, and then continue with a critical reading of the novel Trionfo della morte, the oration Laude dell'illaudato and finally, in more detail, the pastoral tragedy La figlia di Iorio. For Grazia Deledda, from an examination of the narrative syllogies and ethnographic works of her youth, we move on to the analysis of some novellas of her maturity and the novel Canne al vento. As for Silone, after a brief overview of his work, the analysis focuses entirely on his first and most important novel, Fontamara, through a careful investigation of the text. The thesis concludes with a discussion of the work of Anna Maria Ortese, starting with the stories of L'Infanta sepolta that have Naples as their subject, passing through the watershed, not only poetic, but also biographical, of Mare non bagna Napoli, and ending with an analysis of The Iguana.