Money and modernism: The rise of a theme in early 20th-century Italy

Abstract

The primary purpose of this article is to examine how the theme of money developed in the work of the key early 20th-century Italian modernist writers Giovanni Papini, Aldo Palazzeschi, Giovanni Boine, and Carlo Michelstaedter. It also studies the connection between the theme of money and two central concepts in modernist literature: the crisis in the concept of objectivity, and the interpretation of reality as a continuous flow that rejects every possible conceptualization. I argue that money was a metaphor for the crisis of objective truth, a symbol for an existence that had lost all perspective from which to judge and order reality.