Resumo

ROSSI, Annunziata. Italo Svevo y La conciencia de Zeno. Acta poét [online]. 2008, vol.29, n.2, pp.85-99. ISSN 2448-735X.

During the last decades of the nineteenth century, Italo Svevo publishes two novels which go unnoticed by critics. This, and the conflicting roles as both a businessman and an artist, led the author to renounce writing, though he never relinquished his correspondence nor his diary, which served him to "know himself better". The confessions of Zeno (1923) gave him at last a place in Italian and European literary history. This paper examines the main trends of Svevo's last work, intimately related to his own biography: his hero's fight against illness, his psychoanalysis -which makes Zeno analogue to the archetypical Jew studied by Weininger in Sex and Character-, the First World War and his final acknowledgment of "life as illness".

Palavras-chave : Svevo; La conciencia de Zeno.