Lucio Mastronardi's work is tied to a significant, albeit short-lived, effort in postwar Italian fiction that relied on linguistic experimentation to underscore new social realities, including rapid industrialization, materialism, internal immigration, and the problem of a large underclass found mostly in southern Italy. Unlike other avant-garde writers whose experimentations with language were motivated by a desire for formal innovation, Mastronardi was moved, as Gianfranco Contini points out, by his angst about social conditions and his deeply felt need for social change.

The forces that guided Mastronardi's direction as a writer can be identified with Antonio Gramsci, the influential Marxist intellectual who was arrested by the Fascists and died in prison in 1937, and Carlo Emilio Gadda, whose work combines standard Italian and the dialects of various Italian regions. Gramsci saw language as a sociopolitical tool that committed Marxist writers should use to broaden self-consciousness within the proletarian class. Gadda's...