The article examines the dynamics of interaction between fathers and sons in Giorgio Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi-Contini in a Lacanian perspective. In doing so, it discusses the often uncritically ascribed label of Bildungsroman as belonging to the novel in question only as an element of parody, which more keenly underscores the tension of the time between the approval of the racial laws (November 1938) and the eve of WWII (August 1939). It also provides the basis for further discussion on the identity of the narrating subject and his role in the Romanzo di Ferrara as a whole.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Malaguti, A., (2025), "More Becoming to a Man: Fathers, Sons, and the Novel of Education in Giorgio Bassani’s Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Quaderni d'italianistica

Original publication: Malaguti, Andrea. "More Becoming to a Man: Fathers, Sons, and the Novel of Education in Giorgio Bassani’s Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini." Quaderni d'italianistica 35 (2): 2015. 139-166. DOI: 10.33137/q.i..v35i2.23619. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Quaderni d'italianistica. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Quaderni d'italianistica under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.