“Noi giovani”. Costruzioni narrative e immaginario collettivo sui giovani tra Settecento e Novecento

Abstract

At the end of the eighteenth century, on the influence of Rousseau’s production, and thanks to that series of social transformations that are at the basis of the birth of bourgeois society, a new social category appears on the public scene, that of the “young”, which since then it will be decisive and at the center of every theory and public discourse. Constructed and imagined by literature, during the nineteenth century the figure of the “young man” was consolidated and built around some paradigms: self-affirmation, the – often violent – contrast with the generation of fathers, the need to impose himself as hero and rejection of the adult world. The present essay traces these characteristic traits of the construction of the image of youth through some of the main literary contributions of the time, up to the First World War: the Great War marks, in fact, for the category of “youth” the passage from myth to history.