De Sanctis: Appunti di estetica. Leopardi, Schopenhauer, Darwin e la letteratura

Abstract

Francesco De Sanctis never redacted those rules of Aesthetics that the Zurigo lessons could foreshadow he would write on that matter and that he would like to leave to posterity. But the glimmers of it can be found in some of his most important writings about literature and society. In Schopenhauer e Leopardi (1996 [1858]) the pervasiveness between form and subject matter is exalted as well as in the writings dedicated to Darwinism in Art and to some novels by Émile Zola. In them Realism is opposed to Arcadic tradition of Italian literature and an appeasing vision of it. A Desanctisian Aesthetics based on those issues was the center of a possible Benedetto Croce-Giovanni Gentile-Antonio Gramsci line-up. It is built on the ideality of a new Popular National literature that finds its turning point in it.