2026 Theses Doctoral

Cesare Pavese and Spoken Style. The Invention of U.S. Literature under Fascism.

Abbattista, Luca

This dissertation analyzes the movement of books and writing practices from the U.S. to Italy during the 1930s and early 1940s, focusing on the writer Cesare Pavese (1908–1950). It argues that Pavese’s reception and reinvention of American literary practices, especially what is defined as “spoken style” (i.e. the literary mimesis of demotic speech) became entangled with the deep socio-political tensions generated within Italy’s nation-building project and deepened by the Great War, such as the friction between local and national identity and tensions among social classes.

The study draws on different theoretical paradigms and subfields such as book history, literary formalism, and a sociology of art to examine a vast array of materials: archival records, book catalogues, Pavese’s early essays and fiction, his epistolary exchanges, contemporary Italian and French translations of U.S. authors, and a range of prose and poetic works by Italian and U.S. writers active during the interwar years.

The study situates these materials within the broader dynamics of the rise of the U.S. as a new cultural center, the transatlantic and European book market, and fascist censorship policy. The dissertation concludes that Pavese’s engagement with “spoken style” allowed his texts to occupy an unclaimed formal position within the Italian literary field, while simultaneously responding to a collective anxiety over national cohesion.