Evolution denied. Generational conflict as a factor of political, social and economic immobility in Federico De Roberto's "I Viceré"

Authors

  • Luca Bani Università degli studi di Bergamo

Keywords:

De RobertoI Viceré, Aristocracy, Family conflicts, Immobilism

Abstract

The essay addresses Federico De Roberto’s major work, I Viceré (1894), a novel in which the generations that alternate in the Uzeda-Francalanza family and the confrontation/conflict that characterizes their relationship strongly recalls the realist prescriptions on the ineluctability / immobility of power and the profound distrust of social evolution that characterize Sicily, deeply inscribed as it is in the mental habitus of the nineteenth-century Sicilian social classes system. The certainty of the failure of any attempt at regeneration is amplified in the text not only by precise thematic recurrences, but also by a semantic watermark that, especially through the anaphora of specific words, emphasizes the disappointment investing a condition that seems immutable.

Author Biography

Luca Bani, Università degli studi di Bergamo

Luca Bani is Associate Professor of Italian Literature at the Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Cultures, University of Bergamo. Since 2008 he has been a member of the scientific committees of French Italian studies journals Italies and Transalpina and since 2022 he has co-edited the Acta e Studia series published by Cisalpino-Monduzzi. His research focuses on the literature and culture of the Lombard eighteenth century (Mascheroni, Paolina Secco Suardo Grismondi, Alessandro Verri), on natural and urban landscape in nineteenth-twentieth century poetic and narrative texts (Carducci, Pascoli, d'Annunzio, Pavese, Moravia, Th. Mann, Ibsen, Woolf), and on eighteenth and nineteenth-century epistolography (Bettinelli, Cesare Cantù, De Amicis, De Gubernatis).

Published

30-12-2023

How to Cite

Bani, L. (2023). Evolution denied. Generational conflict as a factor of political, social and economic immobility in Federico De Roberto’s "I Viceré". Elephant & Castle, (31). Retrieved from https://elephantandcastle.unibg.it/index.php/eac/article/view/468