The Italian literature dealing with antifascist themes is particularly abounding, just as strong and intense has been the movement that fought against the fascist regime during the twenty years it ruled the Country and also later, during the war, in the form of organized and armed resistance groups. For this reason, the literary production may often seem composite or puzzling, as heterogeneous and manifold were the antifascist political forces that operated on the Italian territory and throughout Europe, and it therefore requires to be studied as a whole, not only in its specifically literary expressions, bur also in its political and scientific production. It is in fact necessary to consider the work of people like Croce, Gobetti, Salvemini, the Rosselli brothers, Gramsci and other writers of the catholic democratic groups, in order to understand the cultural climate of those times, which inspired the ones who operated in Italy as well as those who had been forced to expatriate for political reasons. It can be easily understood, by the names of the above remembered authors, that the Italian antifascist literature doesn’t show an unique and uniform approach, and it is instead characterized by the diversified positions and individual beliefs of the single writers who contributed to it.
We can therefore find, on one side, some authors who denunciate the contradictions and misery suffered by the Country without directly contributing to an alternative political project (C. Levi, Alvaro, Moravia); but on the other side we can also find those who maintain a controversial or argumentative relation with the Italian Communist Party (PCI), oscillating between a full support to the PCI political and cultural project and the preservation of their own intellectual autonomy and independence (Vittorini, Pavese, Silone), and finally those (Jovine, Pratolini) who fully adhere to the PCI political line as it had been theorized by Gramsci.