La tragedia del lavoro: working class heroes nella letteratura italiana d’inizio millennio

The paper aims at exploring how the literary representation of the worker has changed between the end of 20th-century and the beginning of the 21st-century. With the fall of the 20th-century ideologies and raising the fragmentation of labour, texts have emerged in Italian literature which illustrated the tragic social and existential condition of the working class. Among these texts we can find some récits de filiation written by sons and daughters of workers whose health and ideals have been undermined even down to death. These typology of texts let emerged two equally tragic characters: fathers, ill and defeated but still working class heroes and sons, tragically conscious of their roles witnesses-superstites of those ‘denied heroes’. Among the texts being tackled in the paper Il nemico (2009) by Emanuele Tonon, Amianto (2012) by Alberto Prunetti, Il fuoco a mare (2015) by Andrea Bottalico, Ilva Football Club (2016) by Fulvio Colucci and Lorenzo d’Alò