Origins, models, themes, language, and politics of neorealism

Neorealism as an object of study has turned out to be a puzzling problem of literary history. Elio Vittorini – an important neorealist novelist, editor of the interdisciplinary journal Il Politecnico (1945-7) that championed neorealism, and editor of “I Gettoni,” a series devoted to young writers published by Einaudi from 1951 to 1958 – maintained that each neorealist writer had his or her own neorealism. Pier Paolo Pasolini thought that what neorealists had in common was basically just a “taste” for the real. Some critics point to Gli indifferenti (The Time of Indifference, 1929) by Alberto Moravia, to Luce fredda (Cold Light, 1933) by Umberto Barbaro (1902-59), and to Tre operai (Three Workers, 1934) by Carlo Bernari (1909-92) as examples of early neorealist novels, but other critics cite Cesare Pavese's Paesi tuoi (The Harvesters, 1941) as the only proto-neorealist text before World War II. The term neorealismo was used occasionally in Italy in the 1930s to refer to new forms of realism (for example, the German Neue Sachlichkeit) then emerging in Europe in opposition to nonrealist movements such as expressionism, futurism, and symbolism. In Italy, modernist forms of realism flourished in the 1930s, ranging from the “magic realism” of Massimo Bontempelli (1878–1960) to the experimental fictions, tinged with surrealism, of Paola Masino (1908–89), to the existential novels of Moravia and Barbaro. Novels such as Maria Zef (Maria Zef, 1936) by Paola Drigo (1876–1938) testify to the enduring legacy of verismo and foreshadow the neorealist interest in the economic underdevelopment of many regions of Italy, particularly the South or the Mezzogiorno.