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

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.