Il Neorealismo. Nascita e usi di una categoria letteraria

This paper focuses on Neorealism as an "avant-garde" in the sense proposed by Bourdieu, namely as an alliance of "new" writers, literary critics and publishers who acquire symbolic domination over a field by introducing new criteria to create and evaluate literary works. The success of the literary Neorealism is explained as the result of an alliance with the concomitant avant-gardes in the cinematographic and political fields. Without this confederation, the attempt might have failed, as was the cad when the word "Neorealism" appeared for the first time at the beginning of the 30s, when a similar attempt to reinvigorate Italian literature by translating German novels of the Neue Sachlichkeit did not meet with success.