L'evoluzione negata. Il conflitto generazionale come fattore di immobilismo politico, sociale ed economico ne "I Viceré" di Federico De Roberto

Abstract

The essay addresses Federico De Roberto’s major work, I Viceré (1894), a novel in which the generations that alternate in the Uzeda-Francalanza family and the confrontation/con-flict that characterizes their relationship strongly recalls the realist prescriptions on the ineluctability / immobility of pow-er and the profound distrust of social evolution that charac-terize Sicily, deeply inscribed as it is in the mental habitus of the nineteenth-century Sicilian social classes system. The certainty of the failure of any attempt at regeneration is am-plified in the text not only by precise thematic recurrences, but also by a semantic watermark that, especially through the anaphora of specific words, emphasizes the disappoint-ment investing a condition that seems immutable.