'Un estraneo in una terra ostile': Exile and Engagement in Pasolini's Verse Dramas

Concentrates on the brief period of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s career between 1966 and 1969 when he dedicated a significant portion of his energy to the theater. Argues that these years contain Pasolini’s most direct engagement with bourgeois Italian culture: he largely drops his use of dialect in favor of Standard Italian, he sets his plays in modern urban Italy or in places related to it by analogy or allegory, and he explicitly envisages a public made up of the "advanced groups of the bourgeoisie." Once this theatrical period closes, Pasolini’s narrative works tend to create their own hermetic environment in which to play themselves out.