Fictions of Youth

Fictions of Youth is a comprehensive examination of adolescence as an aesthetic, sociological, and ideological category in Pier Paolo Pasolinis prose, poetry, and cinema. Simona Bondavallis book explores the multiple ways in which youth, real and imagined, shaped Pasolinis poetics and critical positions and shows how Pasolinis works became the basis for representations of contemporary young people, particularly Italians. From Pasolinis own coming of age under Fascism in the 1940s to the consumer capitalism of the 1970s, youth stood for innocence, vitality, and rebellion. Pasolinis representations of youth reflected and shaped those ideas. Offering a systematic treatment of youth and adolescence within Pasolinis eclectic body of work, Fictions of Youth provides both a broad overview of the changing nature of youth within Italian modernity and an in-depth study of Pasolinis significant contribution to that transformation.