"Throughout her thirty-five novels and 350 short stories, Grazia Deledda presents a spectrum of male characters who collectively exhibit the commonly accepted symptoms of arrested maturation.

If her protagonists were to congeal into a composite man, together they would constitute a "classic case." In Grazia Deledda's Eternal Adolescents: The Pathology of Arrested Maturation, the author shows that a century ago Grazia Deledda identified a psycho/sociological pathology and analyzed it thoroughly by superimposing her own perspicacious, psychological template upon the relationships of her fictional characters. In important instances the arrested maturation of Deledda's male characters helps to advance the plot of her stories in ways that would be improbable otherwise.

Throughout Deledda's novels, truncated maturity functions as a psychological undertow sucking down its sufferers and their loved ones to the depths of fictive drama."--BOOK JACKET.