“The Little World” by Giovannino Guareschi: how the microcosm of a province becomes the image of the whole country

Abstract

“The Little World” by Giovannino Guareschi is a cycle of 346 short stories, describing the world of Italian countryside in the first decades after the end of the World War II. This peasant world with its poverty and political tensions, different conflicts and contradictions, became the image of an Italian soul and cultural values for both Italian readers and foreigners. It is the most translated Italian text of 21st century. The present research provides the analysis of literary construction, narrative schemes and technics used by the author. The first part of the article is dedicated to geographical reality and illusions, to how it becomes a chronotope. The second part shows the functions and the system of main characters and the mechanism of their interaction. We also give a short overview of the Italian political background, that explains why such a literary analysis was absent until now.