Like ‘1945’, the emblematic date of ‘1956’ is seen as heralding the start of a new period in Italian literary history, and for broadly similar non-literary reasons. But it would be some time before the true extent of the broad cultural changes which began to be felt in the mid-1950s could be gauged. It is true that the political events of 1956 itself in Eastern Europe did register promptly with an influential portion of the Italian intelligentsia. Khruschev's partially leaked denunciation of Stalin at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Soviet military intervention in Hungary and Poland in the same year delivered a profound shock to the intellectual left, caused many sympathisers among the educated classes to abandon their support for the Italian Communist Party, and initiated a period of reassessment of the relations between literature and politics. But this was less important in the long run than the very rapid expansion of the Italian economy in the ‘boom years’ (1958–63), the new levels of prosperity and choice offered by the triumph of consumerism from the 1960s onwards, and the effect which these had on the social and material conditions of literature, both at the point of production and at that of consumption. At this broad level, the period under consideration in this chapter is distinguished from its predecessors by three factors in particular: the extension of educational and cultural opportunities to a greatly increased number of people; an unprecedented degree of commercial concentration and rationalisation in the production of the printed word; and the insertion of publishing in a complex web of ‘cultural industries’, amongst which there are media and technologies which seem to present a direct challenge to literature.
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