The Italian peasant movement since World War I: History and literature

Abstract

The Melbourne Peasant Movement conference illustrates the interdisciplinary cooperation which is starting to occur in Italian studies. A question to be asked is what light can literature specialists cast on our understanding of historical or sociological problems. A society begins to understand its traumas through its imaginative literature. Writers depicting peasant society face dilemmas in their attempts to depict peasant society in its positive and negative aspects and in its cultural attainments. Literary critics perhaps now need to show how it is that writers can transfer images of a particular place and time into symbols of general value.