In the aftermath of the liberation, the Politecnico, a magazine founded and directed by Vittorini, affirms itself as the organ and emblem of a new pedagogical project, with the aim of affirming the central role of culture and intellectuals in the process of national renewal, which is conceived as a work of acculturation of the masses and as an update of conceptual tools and literary references. The defense of the independence of culture against the prevarications of politics, in the course of a famous controversy between Vittorini and the Communist Party apparatus, is however a message that is not initially received by the writers, who find a sure orientation in engagement and in realist poetics. Thus, under the label of neorealism, even more through cinema than literature, established and novice writers grapple with the canonical themes of a narrative reduced to a chronicle. In the same period, B. Fenoglio achieves very personal results. Of a prose without roots, other than those close to lyricizing calligraphy or a certain Spartan sobriety (the best fruit of neorealist vogue), we can certainly speak for a lot of fiction of the 1950s, in which the most disparate recoveries are reported (from H. James to De Roberto) by G. Bassani, C. Cassola and G. Tomasi di Lampedusa.
Against modernist conformism, a modernly experimental PP Pasolini returns to Pascoli and Verga to seek a path not yet taken towards the modern and to demonstrate how, having reached the bottom of the modern, one cannot fail to return to its origins. It is therefore with the attitude of a philologist that the writer coldly reconsiders the problem of the novel, focusing on the dialect and recognizing the language of reality in the Roman dialect (Ragazzi di vita, 1955), as Friulian had been the language of poetry for him. A language of reality that will then be coherently identified in cinema. Approximately close to the Pasolini narrator, Gadda is known to the general public only since the 1950s. And he is the writer who is assigned the main role in the twentieth-century renewal of our invented prose. Official and at the same time secluded, the poetics of the second hermetic generation choose a less arduous path, of adjustment and moderation of excesses (M. Luzi, G. Caproni, V. Sereni, A. Bertolucci).
At the beginning of the 1960s, well beyond the development of the theme on industrial literature (in which O. Ottieri, G. Parise and P. Volponi begin to stand out), the resumption of reflection on modernity and on literature in general. The writers recover the propulsive function of the historical avant-garde, in the light of new cultural parameters: phenomenology, critical Marxism, the Frankfurt School, psychoanalysis, nouveau roman, the German Group 47. And it is in this atmosphere that the neo-avant-garde was born, for many identified in Group 63. If in poetry the neo-avant-gardists manage to establish a leadership lasting, their narrative proposals affect only on the surface a particularly fertile area such as that of the novel, where the search for some writers who escape any label continues, from E. Morante to Volponi, from L. Sciascia to Italy Calvino. Among the poets of the period we remember in particular A. Pierro, A. Zanzotto, G. Giudici.
According to TIMEDICTIONARY.COM, literature in prose and poetry after 1968 does not recognize leading figures, but suffers the hegemony of the neo-avant-garde. In poetry, instead of lines, isolated names emerge: D. Bellezza, M. Cucchi, M. De Angelis, V. Magrelli. Storytellers, less subject to the blackmail of the previous generation but also crushed by the comparison with older writers in business (among whom G. Bufalino, R. La Capria, G. Bonaviri, L. Malerba, V. Consolo know a happy season, G. Pontiggia), only those with a more pronounced literary vocation are saved (G. Celati, F. Cordelli, A. Tabucchi, G. Montefoschi), for whom the art of the story still has a meaning that is not purely commercial, but it is no longer even reduced to an abstract search for prototypes.
