Fictions of Youth is a comprehensive examination of adolescence as an aesthetic, sociological, and ideological category in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s prose, poetry, and cinema. Simona Bondavalli’s book explores the multiple ways in which youth, real and imagined, shaped Pasolini’s poetics and critical positions and shows how Pasolini’s works became the basis for representations of contemporary young people, particularly Italians. From Pasolini’s own coming of age under Fascism in the 1940s to the consumer capitalism of the 1970s, youth stood for innocence, vitality, and rebellion. Pasolini’s representations of youth reflected and shaped those ideas.

Offering a systematic treatment of youth and adolescence within Pasolini’s eclectic body of work, Fictions of Youth provides both a broad overview of the changing nature of youth within Italian modernity and an in-depth study of Pasolini’s significant contribution to that transformation.