In the years that immediately followed the second world war, the Italian literature mainly related the problems encountered by the bourgeoisie of that time. The analysis was predominantly directed towards the typical topics inherent to middle-class issues, and it was only slightly concerned by the contradictions generated by the conflict that opposed the middle-class to the working and the rural ones. The first kind of approach was generally influenced by the main movements of the international literature (Proust, Musil, Joyce, Kafka,), which deeply explored the inner reality of the human soul and searched for the causes of its anguish, but without analyzing the relations between this distress and the particular issues of a determined historical moment; Freud and the existentialists were the favorite tools that influenced this kind of investigation, but the dimension of the political juxtaposition was essentially left apart. It is consequently not a surprise if one cannot find any political accents in Pirandello’s works, or if even Moravia always declared, talking about Gli indifferenti, that he didn’t intend to make a political claim out of his book. As a matter of fact, anyway, his novel was to be considered one of the first political statements of the new realism, just because, and this even beyond the writer’s intentions, the simple description of the middle-class characteristic lifestyles sounded as a strong accusation towards this class now depicted as hollow, “worthless” or “without any qualities”. During the years of the fascist period, however, themes concerning the class conflict only appeared in some of the books by Vittorini and in the literary production concerning the specific problems of the south of Italy, but they never got to become particularly relevant.
