Includes bibliographical references (p. 407-480) and indexes.

What this book is about -- First, confused examples -- Making decisions in order to proceed -- A tree neither genealogical nor botanical -- Twelve categories not to be too sharply distinguished -- Some twentieth-century novels -- Praising and disparaging the functional.

Translated here into English for the first time is a monumental work of literary history and criticism comparable in scope and achievement to Eric Auerbach's "Mimesis". Italian critic Francesco Orlando explores Western literature's obsession with outmoded and nonfunctional objects (ruins, obsolete machinery, broken things, trash, etc). Combining the insights of psychoanalysis and literary-political history, Orlando traces this obsession to a turning point in history, at the end of eighteenth-century industrialisation, when the functional becomes the dominant value of Western culture. Roaming through every genre and much of the history of Western literature, the author identifies distinct categories into which obsolete images can be classified and provides myriad examples. The function of literature in our culture, he concludes, is to remind us of what we have lost and what we are losing as we rush toward the future.