Mimesis

The French interwar period sees a complete aesthetic renewal: both the novels of the 1929-born ‘populist’ literary movement and the talking films of the time seek to dive into the daily lives of employees and workers in order to give them more visibility. The present study explores this new populist aesthetics and the powerful working class imaginary it succeeded in building.

Dante, the pilgrim, is the image of an author who stubbornly looks ahead, seeking and building the "Great Beyond" (Manguel). Following in his footsteps is therefore not a return to the past, going à rebours, but a commitment to the future, to exploring the potential of humanity to "transhumanise".

This dynamic of self-transcendence in Dante’s humanism (Ossola), which claims for European civilisation a vocation for universalism (Ferroni), is analysed in the volume at three crucial moments: Firstly, the establishment of an emancipatory relationship between author and reader (Ascoli), in which authorship is authority and not power; secondly, the conception of vision as a learning process and horizon of eschatological overcoming (Mendonça); finally, the relationship with the past, which is never purely monumental, but ethically and intertextually dynamic, in an original rewriting of the original scriptural, medieval, and classical culture (Nasti, Bolzoni, Bartolomei).

A second group of contributions is dedicated to the reconstruction of Dante’s presence in Portuguese literature (Almeida, Espírito Santo, Figueiredo, Marnoto, Vaz de Carvalho): they attest to the innovative impact of Dante’s work even in literary traditions more distant from it.

Mario Vargas Llosa’s intellectual transformations, from socialism to pragmatism, and liberalism, are reflected in his political and historical fiction. From Sartrean anti-authoritarianism in La ciudad y los perros to an increasingly liberal world view in Cinco esquinas, El héroe discreto, or Travesuras de la niña mala, this monograph documents the Peruvian Nobel Prize winner’s philosophical and literary journey.