Compared to poetry, the Italian novel of the early twentieth century appears relatively underdeveloped. This weakness can be attributed mainly to the relative absence in modern Italian history of a strong middle-class culture within which the novel, as in France and England, could have evolved. The work of Italy's greatest nineteenth-century novelists, Manzoni and Verga, was affected to a notable degree by foreign writers (Scott and Zola respectively) and, with very few exceptions (Svevo and Gadda), the same is true throughout the first half of the twentieth century: Italian novelists are significantly influenced by imported fiction, particularly British and American.

The most important direction which the modern Italian novel took after Verga was toward greater subjectivity. The total social world of the naturalist perspective was replaced, in the best novelistic production of the time, by the totality of the individual subject. In Pirandello's novels (see above, pp. 481–3) a single commonplace event enclosed a lifetime's experience, while with D'Annunzio (above, pp. 473–6) the life encapsulated in an object or set of memories harboured the spiritual substance of mysterious essences. For both these writers, the individual stood at odds with an external reality of anarchic forces, taking refuge beyond the borders of reason in some rarefied ontological space. By means of literature, D'Annunzio transformed life into art and spectacle; whereas Pirandello demonstrated that true life was realisable outside the self, either in nature or in madness.