ABSTRACT
More generally, Flaubert's works leave little room for the celebration of diversity — individual anomalies are usually either crushed by social homogenisation, or reduced to a grotesque form of inadequateness to the ubiquitous norm. While Pirandello's umorismo tends to soften the most disturbing aspects of irregularity, and while Svevo's irony downplays the Romantic opposition between anomaly and the norm, Palazzeschi emphasises and exaggerates individual diversity, as a cheerful sign of nature's infinite variety. A good starting point for the analysis of Palazzeschi's dialogue with the nineteenth-century tradition is provided by a metaphor recurring in both 'Il gobbo' and 'Lumachino'. While being best exemplified by the short-story collection Il palio dei buffi, this fundamental aspect of Palazzeschi's aesthetics is already evident in his early poetry — especially in L'incendiario, where the collision between oddity and the norm is systematically represented in a farcical manner.
