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

Giambattista Masciotta), then supported

more and more by the economic, social,

political forces and by a wide margin of

public opinion (suffice it to note that the

general political elections of 1921 in Molise

were based on this issue, that transformed

into a unified “bloc” the 7/8 of the existing

parties), conferred to the budding literature

in dialect, and not just in dialect, an

autochthonous conservative impulse, that

more than ever aimed to find, with the

mimetic instruments offered by the

vernacular (more precisely by the

vernaculars) the authentic, true, profound

spirit of a Molise which had to be discovered

in its “essence,” in its unmistakable human

dimension, historically intact and pure, in its

“rurality,” as it was proudly remarked later

on, at the height of the Fascist era.

This focus on an existing “molisanness,”