Italian Literary Anthologies of the 20th Century as a Vehicle for Literary Change.

This research project offers an original contribution to the ongoing debate on literary history and to the many attempts to rethink literature and history within a broader framework. What makes the anthology particularly relevant for the study of literary change, is that it embodies contradictions. Due to its highly hybrid character, it is both essential and superficial,comprehensive and fragmentary, it is a mediator between author- and text oriented approaches on the one hand and larger historical and literary categories on the other. Historicized, the anthology becomes a monument, and sometimes a window, opening unto contemporary voices and drawing new lines for future poetics. The project examines two perspectives: Firstly, a general framework, within which I will map the (co-)existence of different types, genres and shifting positions of the italian literary anthology (1900-2000). Secondly, through the detailed analysis of three clusters of representative subgenres within the umbrella term "anthology", the project investigates the diachronical, programmatic and thematic means through wich this "genre" creates new conceptions of literary change.