ABSTRACT

Edoardo Sanguineti argues that Giovanni Pascoli continued the romantic revolution by extending the right to citizenship in poetry to all the elements of reality. At the end of the nineteenth century, Pascoli repeats romanticism's ideological move by detecting poetic situations not only in the bourgeois reality, but also in the world of the petty bourgeoisie. In Sanguineti, a literary operation is invariably joined to a cognitive and ultimately ethical preoccupation: attempting to arrive at things is a matter not of aesthetic pleasure, but of ethical duty. Sanguineti's position on realism led him to legitimize the avant-garde in light of Marxist theories considerate nel loro insieme, a 'heroic' task according to Muzzioli. The avant-garde must challenge the aesthetic canon as well as the social order by accepting to become a living contradiction in the mercantile regime of art and by pushing art to the limit.