This paper centers on the nature of Gabriele d’Annunzio’s first, and very influential novel, Il piacere, and its influence on Italian thought at the time. I argue that Il piacere is truly a breviary, to borrow Cevasco’s term, a bible—or in socio-economic terms, a manifesto—for its time. I draw from Charles Altieri’s Radical Poetics and from Martin Puchner’s Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos and the Avant-Gardes to prove that Il piacere is indeed a social critique of its time, an attempt by D’Annunzio to bridge the gap that Italian Unification produced by projecting a mostly agricultural country—which had long lost its epic stature, dating back to the Renaissance years—into modern thought and society.
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