This dissertation explores how Italian modernist literature employs non-anthropocentric narrative forms to represent more-than-human (Franklin 2023) phenomena in ways accessible to human understanding. Engaging with debates on humanity’s role in society and culture, the study builds on New Formalism (Levine 2015) and Econarratology (Caracciolo 2021) to analyze how Luigi Pirandello, Carlo Emilio Gadda, and Gianna Manzini question human exceptionalism through innovative narrative forms.

Drawing from David Herman’s reframing of modernism (2011) through an enactivist lens (Varela et al. 1991), this dissertation questions the notion of Italian modernism as peripheral, positioning it within a broader European context and highlighting its ties to Anglo-American modernist experimentation with both human and more-than-human subjectivity. Building on Herman’s definition of modernism as intraspecific (focused within the human species), this study advances an interspecific (among different species) perspective, in light of Jakob von Uexküll’s concept of Umwelt (1934), challenging the representation of modernism as purely introspective and foregrounding its representation of an interconnected reality. The research employs close reading for a detailed analysis of the corpus texts and incorporates mid-range reading (Booth 2017) to identify broader narrative structures, hence allowing for the use of digital tools where necessary.

Four studies and an introductory essay compose the doctoral thesis. The first two focus on Pirandello’s Novelle per un anno (1884-1936) where interactions between human and more-than-human animals are represented through parallels and mediating characters. The third study compares Gadda’s Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana (1957) and Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy (2014), showcasing their convoluted and nonlinear structures that seem to defy anthropocentric views by depicting reality as an expanding network of human and more-than-human interactions beyond human control. The fourth study analyzes the section Amici alberi from Manzini’s Boscovivo (1932) focusing on the way analogies are employed to word trees’ experiences, hence underscoring the role that analogical forms can have in narrating more-than-human stories. This last study contributes to Italian modernist studies not only by moving away from anthropomorphism but also by shifting the focus beyond the dominance of male authorship in the Italian literary canon.

Ultimately, this dissertation identifies four key formal strategies—as if anthropomorphism, interspecies mediation, narrative fragmentation, and analogical storytelling—that facilitate non-anthropocentric representation. Such strategies demonstrate literature’s ability to decenter human perspective and to engage with posthumanist and ecocritical discourse. Furthermore, through the combination of New Formalism and Econarratology, this doctoral thesis offers heuristic tools to reinterpret both canonical and overlooked texts, demonstrating their ability to offer different perspectives on literature.