ABSTRACT
A high degree of experimentation was a constant feature of Elio Vittorini's work, and equally present was his convinction that a new prose style was a vital tool in order to reach new knowledge and new truths. In the first years of his literary career, up until the early 1930s, Vittorini mainly tried his hand at three different prose styles. If Il garofano rosso and Viaggio in Sardegna showed the first signs of Vittorini's new style, Erica was his first achievement in terms of a convergence between stylistic experimentation and ideological discourse. A comparison of the ideological content of Erica and Conversazione in Stcilia reveals some similarities, particularly in their depiction of the class struggle, but the parallel ends there. Stylistically, a major addition to Vittorini's repertoire came from his discovery of American fiction. The static nature of a painting is achieved by Vittorini not only through the erosion of the naturalistic chronology that we normally expect from a story.
