Abstract

The study highlights the originality of Consolo's stylistic experimentation and examines the iconological construction of two historical novels, The Smile of the Unknown Sailor and The Torment of Palermo. The adoption of an iconic perspective is the rhetorical strategy with which the Sicilian author formalizes techniques of metaphorical irradiation and analogical sequences. The problematic intensity of the historic invention is set out in a complex mesh of symmetries and antitheses among pictorial and narrative symbols, and is articulated as a metonymic flow of images that are able to show materials and forms of the modern novel.