Italian Neorealism (Literature)

Italian Neorealism in literature was a movement in Italian fiction that emerged during and immediately after the Second World War, roughly from the early 1940s through the 1950s, depicting the hardship, poverty and moral compromise of ordinary Italians under Fascism, wartime occupation and the difficult postwar reconstruction, in a plain, unsentimental prose style closely allied with the better-known Italian Neorealist cinema of the same period. Its central literary figures included Cesare Pavese, Elio Vittorini, whose 1945 novel Uomini e no directly depicted the Resistance, Primo Levi, whose If This Is a Man recorded his own experience of Auschwitz, and Alberto Moravia in his more socially engaged early work, several of whom also contributed screenplays to the parallel Neorealist film movement. Reacting against both the ornate literary style favored under Fascism and Fascist propaganda's falsification of Italian social reality, Neorealist writers favored working-class and rural settings, dialect-inflected speech and documentary-like attention to material conditions, and the movement is generally treated as the founding current of postwar Italian literature.