The essays collected in this volume deal with the relationship between literature and the material life of Italy, from the postwar years to the 21st century, exploring the idea of literature as a symbolic form able to represent spheres of experience that are inaccessible to historiography. The book is divided into two parts. The first section addresses the influence of the journal "Officina" and "Il Menabò" as workshops of the late 20th century, and combines different critical approaches (thematic criticism, the Freudian theory of Francesco Orlando, the hermeneutic materialism of Romano Luperini). The second part, on the other hand, investigates some masters of the 20th century who continued to write into the mid-80s (Parise, Fortini, Primo Levi, Volponi, Morante, Sciascia) and four postwar writers (Affinati, De Signoribus, De Ruscio, Sarchi). The aim is to examine all of those texts that represent the Italian "mutation" with which literary works were able to respond to the ulcerations of history. The question posed by the title, therefore, is intended to allude to the question of the relationship between a writing of invention and truthful writing, and between literary works and the world.