"In this work Giuliana Minghelli examines Svevo's unique contribution to twentieth-century literature within the framework of his parodic Darwinian fables of the prehistoric encounter between the weak and 'unfinished' man and the incommensurable 'other.' In looking at such novels as Confessions of Zeno and As a Man Grows Older, Minghelli shows how Svevo's fiction displaces the heroic strain in modernism, revealing the self-construction of the subject as an ongoing symbiosis with otherness.".

"Minghelli situates Svevo's work in its cultural context, especially in relation to the writings of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Otto Weininger, and Italian contemporaries such as Giacomo Debenedetti.

Working at the intersection of poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, and feminist and postcolonial theories, Minghelli provides a close analysis of Svevo's novels and short stories, exploring the construction of self through constant contamination with the world and the other, a process that consciously subverts accepted narratives of evolutionary progress, gender identities, and national and racial belonging."--BOOK JACKET.