Tra parricidio e orfanezza. Dialettica della modernità letteraria.

The thesis developed in this essay is the one expressed in the Introduction: "Literary modernism dialectically conflicts with tradition. It intends to emancipate from tradition, but it can't do without". A check of this idea of modernity as the "rebellious daughter of tradition" is outlined here pointing first of all to its two most unsettling turning points, that is the romantic revolution and the avant-garde of the beginning of the 20th century: the former with its battles against rules, mythology, the imitation of the Classics, and the choice of a popular public; the latter, experimenting hybrid forms and irreverent themes, in the name on an idea of liberty intolerant of any restrictions. However, after committing the symbolic "parricide", the twentieth-century authors discover they are "orphans" and set out again looking backwards in search of "adoptive fathers".