Il comunista. Una storia letteraria dalla Resistenza agli anni Settanta

For the first time this book reconstructs thoroughly the history of Italian literature between the Second World War and the Seventies by using the analytical tools elaborated by Bourdieu’s sociological theory. Through an analysis of the literary treatment of Communist characters, the author investigates fundamental questions related to the contemporary artistic world, such as the life-span of cultural innovations, the behavior of the social actors involved, the figure of the politically engaged writer and the relationships between narrative creativity and the social world – especially between literature and the publishing industry or between politics and literature. The latter issue is of particular consistence during the second post-war period, when the Italian Communist Party (PCI) gained a great influence on the intellectual field. The PCI played a fundamental role in defining the questions at stake inside a literary field that was undergoing a major transformation related to the modernization of the Italian society. By studying those general features as well as the individual trajectories of some important Italian writers, the author elaborates a case study of the complex relationship between political and intellectual fields. Baldini draws also on Bourdieu’s Domination masculine in order to explain some recurrent representational systems in the Italian narrative of the period.