Study title

This project aims to be a first step towards redefining the concept of "realism" in the panorama of Italian literature of the first half of the Twentieth Century (1900-1950) based on the study of a very peculiar genre, the "Elzeviro". This is a hybrid literary segment that can be compared with journalistic essays on the one hand, and with literary short stories on the other. These segments were mainly published in newspapers as editorials of the cultural page and have, therefore, have been under-studied by literary scholars. For these reasons one can speak of a neglected genre, or also “cinderella-genre”. (Ansary & Esmat Babaii 2005).

More specifically, this dataset revoles around one particular case study : a corpus of more than 100 elzeviri by Italian writer Grazia Deledda (first female Nobel Prize winner for Literature in Italy) published between 1909 and 1936. The aim was to map the number of literary segments that Deledda wrote for the Corriere della Sera and to analyze them for a number of prototypical features of both verismo and modernismo, starting from the use of time and space: from a naturalistic setting that underlines the couleur locale in a "positivistic" way, to a more modern interpretation of the city where the protagonist finds impulses for introspection.