Invisible Bridges. Uncharted Modernist Connections from Italy to the British Isles

The essay compares aesthetic declarations by reference authors of English modernism (Woolf, Mansfield, Joyce, D.H. Lawrence) with Luigi Pirandello’s and Federigo Tozzi’s critical writings, to show how significant correspondences in terms of ideas about the task of literature, the human mind, and the approach to life can be found among them well before the ‘golden modernist era’ of the 1920s. Attempting a reconstruction of the cultural and philosophical background that might have led to these correspondences, a net of common sources is traced, through which it is possible to follow the secret ‘bridges’ that, despite geographical distance, led these writers to conceive their artistic programmes in such similar terms. I argue that this kinship of interests and aims, based on shared feelings and cultural stimuli, is a ground on which modernism overcame geographical borders, creating a European artistic community where some authors seem to fit even more coherently than in their own national context, even when they did not know that this was where they belonged.