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Abstract:
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In Italy , the period directly following World War II was marked by confusion and turbulence as the people struggled to reconstruct both the ideological and physical infrastructure of the nation . While much study has been dedicated to the evolution of femininity and the figure of the woman in this particular period , comparatively little has been written on the refashioning of masculinity in the texts produced in the period between 1940 and 1955 . After the fall of the Fascist Regime , Italian masculinity undergoes a drastic transformation as the generation of young men born and raised under the tutelage of Mussolini’s reign attempt to separate themselves from the now -tainted codes of conduct governing male behavior . This report analyzes the renegotiation of Italian masculinity in G . Silvano Spinetti’s non -fictional account Difesa di una generazione (scritti e appunti ) , Italo Calvino’s Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno , Beppe Fenoglio’s short story “Gli inizi del partigiano Raoul” and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Ragazzi di vita . These works , written and published in the postwar period , manipulate the
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marginality and privation experienced by the Italian population during the war and postwar period into a liminal state brimming with revolutionary potentiality . The protagonists of these texts (both fictional and non -fictional ) , isolated from the larger social context and deprived of individual identity , property and privilege , circumvent their polluted patriarchal lines in favor of an alternative ideological patriarchy . While Spinetti , Calvino and Fenoglio’s works advance their liminal narratives as a means of creating an emblematic Italian man capable of rejoining the generative discourse , Pasolini’s text renounces such a progressive view . In Ragazzi di vita , the only possibility for a masculine identity free of Fascism resides in a maintaining a perennial liminality . |