Dialect Poetry of Southern Italy (Italian Poetry in Translation Book 2)

dichotomy between people and élite, which

adversely affects the daily use of language

and its literary application: the former

compelled to foster a depriving normalized

use of slang, the latter driven to appear more

and more aloof through the forced retreat

into apparently neopurist spheres, which

might allow it to resist the progressive loss

of halo by reclaiming a norm that shields

from risks and attests the possibility of elitist

survival without obliging it to take refuge in

austere Della-Cruscan areas. As a

consequence, on the one hand there is the

tendency toward a language that might be

proper to an extended “countryside” and

very large “guilds,” on the other toward a

sort of dynamic academic neopetrarchism

developed through stilnovistic and

experimental varieties that take into account

the evolutionary processes of the language