The Jewish-Italian writer Italo Svevo was born and lived in Trieste, then under the rule of Austria-Hungary. He authored three major novels:
Una vita[
A Life, 1892],
Senilità[
As a Man Grows Older, 1898], and
La coscienza di Zeno[
Confessions of Zeno, 1923], as well as numerous short stories, plays and fables. A major figure of Italian modernism, he elevated the novelistic genre within the Italian literary canon, facilitating the transformation from the nineteenth-century naturalist style to the more self-conscious and subjective style of the twentieth. His work was influenced by the philosophy of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, as well as an engagement with Darwinism and psychoanalysis. Throughout his oeuvre, Svevo articulated a critique of bourgeois ideology through the elaboration of a…
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Citation: Minghelli, Giuliana. "Italo Svevo". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 30 March 2010 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=4291, accessed 21 November 2024.]
