Corso di Laurea Magistrale in

Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia D

Corso di Laurea Magistrale in

LINGUE, CULTURE, COMUNICAZIONE

“Io ho quello che ho donato”:

Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Novels in English.

The Fin-de-siècle Translations of Kassandra Vivaria and Georgina Harding

Prova finale di:

Chiara D’Elia Relatore:

Chiar.mo Prof. Diego Saglia

Correlatore

Chiar.mo Prof. Franco Nasi

Anno Accademico 2018/2019

Abstract: The inscription on the pediment above the main entrance of the Vittoriale degli Italiani reads: “Io ho quello che ho donato” [I have what I have given]. This is one of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s most famous maxims. From an artistic and literary perspective, this expression reminds us that an author’s oeuvre is also the product of a combination of heterogeneous influences, including many from abroad. Thus, in order to outline a complete profile of the Italian author and his literary production, it is necessary to analyse the historical background and the multifaceted cultural context in which he lived.

The first aim of this work is to investigate the influence of English culture and literature on D’Annunzio’s literary production. As many scholars have noted, Italy and England established one of the most fertile cultural dialogues ever seen in the Western European literary domain. It became more intense in the second half of the nineteenth century, when Italy was struggling to find its own identity and political stability. The nation was going through a difficult time, and political, social and cultural uncertainties were reflected in the literary production of the period, which arguably lagged behind English and French literature in terms of innovation. In fact, by the end of the nineteenth century, Italian poetry was still an important literary model and a source of inspiration for many writers, whereas the novel took longer to find a place in Italian literature, succeeding over a century after Great Britain.

The first chapter of this work presents a historical and literary excursus, exploring the context in which the novel gained a foothold in Italy and found in D’Annunzio one of its most innovative representatives. As a matter of fact, he was the author of a poetic type of prose, a poem-novel in which sounds and rhythm play significant roles. In order to achieve these results, the novelist did extensive research and maintained contact with

“multicultural” figures, who gathered in the cafés of Rome. The writer was aptly nicknamed “pike” by the French intellectual Romain Rolland, owing to his ability to adapt himself to the kaleidoscopic context in which he lived and draw inspiration from several sources: from French, Russian and especially English literature, the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and the aesthetic theories of Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde.

In such a framework of cultural exchanges, translation plays a major part. In view of women’s traditionally crucial contribution to it, the second and third chapters investigate the role of women in the fields of literature and translation in nineteenth- century England, including the general idea of sexuality in the prudish Victoria era, and the censorship of works and renditions judged as immoral. Reflections of this kind are

necessary, as the purpose of this study is also to analyse how D’Annunzio’s literature was received in fin-de-siècle Great Britain. Therefore, the last two chapters provide a commentary and an analysis on the English versions of the writer’s major novels produced by two female translators: Kassandra Vivaria and Georgina Harding. The fourth chapter focuses on Vivaria’s version of Il Fuoco (1900), and her rendering of its peculiar narrative style and aural effects - its rhythm and sounds. The fifth chapter concentrates on Harding’s renditions of Il Piacere (1889), L’Innocente (1892) and Trionfo della morte (1894), and on the process of self-censorship applied in the bolder passages of the Italian author’s masterpieces. Although the approaches adopted by the two translators differ (foreignizing in the former case, domesticating in the latter), both definitely contributed to D’Annunzio’s fame. These translations are ultimately significant, because they demonstrate how, in spite of accusations of plagiarism and immorality he was routinely subjected to, D’Annunzio influenced writers and artists from all over the world, starting from his translator Vivaria and her novel Via Lucis (1898).

Abstract: “Io ho quel che ho donato”: è questo uno dei più celebri motti di Gabriele D’Annunzio, inciso sul frontone all’ingresso del Vittoriale. In una prospettiva artistico- letteraria, l’espressione ricorda come l’opera di un autore sia anche il prodotto di scambi, una combinazione di influssi eterogenei, spesso provenienti da lontano. Tracciare un profilo completo dello scrittore abruzzese e della sua produzione letteraria significa, quindi, non solo contestualizzarlo a livello storico, ma anche inserirlo in un ampio e complesso scenario, costituito da relazioni e dialoghi tra diverse tradizioni.

Il primo obiettivo di questo lavoro è, infatti, quello di indagare in che modo la cultura e letteratura inglese hanno influenzato l’opera dannunziana. Quello tra Italia ed Inghilterra, infatti, è da considerarsi, come molti studiosi hanno notato, uno dei più fecondi rapporti culturali della storia europea, intensificatosi in un momento politicamente, socialmente e culturalmente arduo per l’Italia, ovvero la seconda metà dell’‘800, quando la nazione era alla ricerca di una propria identità e stabilità politica. Le incertezze si riflettevano in una produzione letteraria che non riusciva a stare al passo con quella delle tradizioni relativamente vicine: infatti, se la poesia italiana continuava a costituire un modello da imitare, non era così per il romanzo, che riuscì a farsi spazio nella letteratura nazionale con oltre un secolo di ritardo e con molta più fatica rispetto alla Gran Bretagna.

Il primo capitolo di questo lavoro propone, quindi, un excursus storico-letterario che indaga questi aspetti, al fine di contestualizzare con precisione la nascita del romanzo moderno in Italia e come questo genere trovò un’espressione fortemente innovativa proprio con D’Annunzio. Egli, infatti, fu il creatore di una prosa poetica in cui lingua, suono e ritmo giocano ruoli centrali. A questi risultati D’Annunzio arrivò dopo una lunga stagione di ricerche e di contatti con personalità “multiculturali” che si radunavano nei caffè letterari della Roma Umbertina. Il “pike”, ovvero “luccio”, come Romain Rolland soprannominò lo scrittore per la sua capacità di adattarsi al caleidoscopico contesto in cui visse, seppe attingere a fonti e tradizioni diverse: dal romanzo francese, russo e soprattutto inglese, all’arte preraffaellita, dalle teorie estetiche di Friedrich Nietzsche, a quelle di Walter Pater ed Oscar Wilde.

In una cornice di scambi e dialoghi tra diverse culture, la traduzione, tradizionalmente considerata un’attività femminile (seppur con qualche contraddizione), gioca un ruolo fondamentale. Per questo motivo, nel secondo e terzo capitolo si vuole indagare la posizione della donna nell’ambito letterario e traduttivo nell’Inghilterra del XIX secolo; si vuole inoltre esplorare la concezione della sessualità nella puritana epoca Vittoriana, quindi la funzione della censura di opere e traduzioni considerate immorali.

Riflettere su questi aspetti è necessario per raggiungere il secondo scopo del presente lavoro: analizzare la ricezione dei romanzi dannunziani nell’Inghilterra di fine ‘800, diffusi attraverso le versioni in lingua inglese di due traduttrici, Kassandra Vivaria e Georgina Harding. Il quarto e quinto capitolo, pertanto, si concentreranno principalmente sullo studio della versione inglese de Il Fuoco (1900), ad opera di Vivaria, e de Il Piacere (1889), di Harding, con qualche riferimento anche alle traduzioni de L’Innocente (1892) e Trionfo della morte (1894). Nel primo caso, ci si focalizzerà sulla resa della lingua, del ritmo e del suono mentre, nel secondo caso, sul processo di auto-censura dei passi più audaci dei capolavori dell’autore. Nonostante due approcci traduttivi sostanzialmente contrastanti (estraniante nel primo caso, addomesticante nel secondo), entrambe contribuirono a diffondere l’opera dannunziana, con il risultato che, nonostante le gravi accuse di plagio e di immoralità, l’autore influenzò, a sua volta, scrittori ed artisti connazionali e stranieri, iniziando proprio dalla sua traduttrice Vivaria, come si evince dal suo unico romanzo Via Lucis (1898).

Sinopsis: La inscripción grabada en el frontón a la entrada del Vittoriale dice: “Io ho quello che ho donato” [Tengo lo que he dado], una de las frases más conocidas de Gabriele D’Annunzio. Desde una perspectiva artística y literaria, la expresión recuerda que la obra de un autor es también producto de intercambios, una combinación de influencias heterogéneas. Por lo tanto, trazar un perfil completo del escritor italiano y su producción literaria significa no solo contextualizarlo a nivel histórico, sino también colocarlo en un escenario amplio y complejo, hecho de relaciones y diálogos entre diferentes tradiciones.

De hecho, el primer objetivo de este trabajo es investigar cómo la cultura y la literatura inglesa influyeron en la obra de D'Annunzio. Como muchos académicos han señalado, la relación cultural entre Italia e Inglaterra debe considerarse una de las más productivas en la historia europea, que se intensificó en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX, cuando Italia estaba pasando por un momento político, social y culturalmente arduo y estaba buscando su propia identidad y estabilidad política. Las incertidumbres se reflejaron en una producción literaria que no seguía el ritmo de las tradiciones cercanas.

De hecho, si la poesía italiana seguía siendo un modelo, la novela se afirmó con más de un siglo de retraso y con mucho más esfuerzo que Gran Bretaña.

El primer capítulo de este trabajo presenta una digresión histórica y literaria, que explora el contexto en el que la novela apareció en Italia y encontró en D'Annunzio uno de sus innovadores. Él fue el autor de un tipo de prosa poética en la que sonidos y ritmo juegan papeles importantes. Para lograr estos resultados, el novelista estudió y mantuvo contactos con figuras "multiculturales" que se reunían en los cafés de Roma. El intelectual francés Romain Rolland apodó el escritor “lucio”, debido a su capacidad de adaptarse al contexto caleidoscópico en el que vivió, y de inspirarse en varias fuentes, específicamente la literatura francesa, rusa e inglesa, el prerrafaelismo y las teorías estéticas de Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Pater y Oscar Wilde.

En este marco de intercambios culturales, la traducción juega un papel importante.

Los capítulos segundo y tercero investigan el papel de las mujeres en los campos de la literatura y la traducción en la Inglaterra del siglo XIX, incluida la idea general de la sexualidad en la época victoriana y la censura de obras inmorales. Reflexiones de este tipo son necesarias ya que el propósito de este estudio es también analizar cómo se recibió la literatura de D’Annunzio en Gran Bretaña, al final del siglo. Por lo tanto, los últimos dos capítulos presentan un comentario y un análisis de las versiones en inglés de las principales novelas del escritor, producidas por dos traductoras: Kassandra Vivaria y

Georgina Harding. El cuarto capítulo se enfoca en la versión de Vivaria de Il Fuoco (1900), y su traducción del peculiar estilo narrativo, del ritmo y de los sonidos. El quinto capítulo se centra en las traducciones de Harding de Il Piacere (1889), L'Innocente (1892) y Trionfo della morte (1894), y en el proceso de autocensura aplicado en los pasajes eróticos de las obras del autor italiano. Aunque las estrategias adoptadas por las dos traductoras son diferentes (de extranjerización en el primer caso y de domesticación en el segundo), ellas indudablemente contribuyeron a la fama de D'Annunzio. En última instancia, estas traducciones son significativas porque demuestran cómo, a pesar de las acusaciones de plagio e inmoralidad a las que fue sometido, D'Annunzio influyó en escritores y artistas de todo el mundo, a partir de su traductora Vivaria y su novela Via Lucis (1898).

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION: ANGLO-ITALIAN CULTURAL DIALOGUES FROM THE

RISORGIMENTO TO THE FIN DE SIÈCLE 1

CHAPTER 1: SHAPING OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL IN GREAT BRITAIN AND ITALY: MUTUAL INFLUENCES AND THE ROLE OF GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO AS

LITERARY MEDIATOR 10

1.1THE MODERN NOVEL: ORIGINS AND CONSOLIDATION IN GREAT BRITAIN AND ITALY 10 1.2WINDS OF CHANGE: FOREIGN INFLUENCES ON THE LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY ITALIAN NOVEL,

FROM DICKENS TO DECADENCE,AESTHETICISM AND PRE-RAPHAELITISM 19 1.3THE OSMOSIS OF FOREIGN TRENDS IN GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO’S PROSE 26 1.4INFLUENCES RETURNED: CRITICISM OF GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO’S NOVELS AND HIS IMPACT ON

FIN-DE-SIÈCLE LITERATURE IN ENGLISH 36

CHAPTER 2: WOMEN NOVELISTS OF FIRST-WAVE FEMINISM AND THE CASE OF

KASSANDRA VIVARIA 43

2.1“ON THE INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF WOMEN”:KASSANDRA VIVARIA’S POSITION ON THE CONDITION OF WOMEN AT THE TURN OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 43 2.2WOMEN AND FICTION WRITING IN BRITAIN, FROM THE EARLY VICTORIAN AGE TO THE FIN DE

SIÈCLE 51

2.3KASSANDRA VIVARIA’S VIA LUCIS: A NOVEL 56

CHAPTER 3: TRANSLATION AND WOMEN OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 65

3.1WOMEN AND TRANSLATION IN BRITAIN, FROM THE EARLY VICTORIAN AGE TO THE FIN DE SIÈCLE

65 3.2SEXUALITY AND CENSORSHIP IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN: AN OVERVIEW 71 3.2NINETEENTH-CENTURY TRANSLATIONS FROM THE ITALIAN: A BRIEF EXCURSUS 75

3.3ELEONORA DUSE PERFORMER AND TRANSLATOR 77

CHAPTER 4: THE FLAME OF LIFE 80

4.1IL FUOCO,1900: FROM ITALIAN TO THE FIRST TRANSLATION INTO FRENCH 80 4.2THE FLAME OF LIFE,1900:KASSANDRA VIVARIA’S TRANSLATION INTO ENGLISH 85 4.3ANALYSIS:VIVARIA’S RENDITION OF RHYTHM AND SOUNDS 88

CHAPTER 5: THE ROMANCES OF THE ROSE 103

5.1THE ROMANCES OF THE ROSE: DISTRIBUTION AND RECEPTION IN GREAT BRITAIN 103 5.2GEORGES HÉRELLE’S TRANSLATION OF IL PIACERE:GEORGINA HARDING’S STARTING POINT 111 5.3GEORGINA HARDING’S THE CHILD OF PLEASURE: A QUESTION OF MEASURE 115

CONCLUSIONS: “IO HO QUELLO CHE HO DONATO” 129

BIBLIOGRAPHY 136

APPENDIX 150

1 Introduction

Anglo-Italian cultural dialogues from the Risorgimento to the fin de siècle

So much the rather thou celestial Light

Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers Irradiate, there plant eyes, all mist from thence Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell

Of things invisible to mortal sight. (Milton 2005: 81)

John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost (1667) is structured around binary oppositions which seek to represent the complexity of human existence. In the last verse of this passage from the third book, the dichotomy between “invisible” and “sight” encapsulates the poet’s idea of his

“impossible task”, focussing on the writer’s own blindness and “his own striking limitations as

‘seer’” (Priest 1981: 112).

When the Italian writer, poet, playwright and journalist Gabriele D’Annunzio was writing Notturno in 1916, he was similarly suffering from a temporary vision impairment caused by an air accident occurred during World War I. With bandages covering his eyes, motionless and shrouded in darkness, he further enriched the paradox of “vision-in-blindness”

(p. 112), which could enable the poet to accomplish the mission that Priest defines as “vatic”

(p. 113), an adjective often associated with D’Annunzio himself, known as il Vate, the national bard:

Io sento tutte le cose prossime ai miei sensi, come il pescatore che va a piedi nudi sul lido scoperto dal riflusso e si china a ogni tratto per riconoscere e raccogliere quel che gli si muove sotto le piante. (D’Annunzio 1947: 154)

The “power of visionary insight” (Priest 1981: 112) has been characteristic of the Western literary tradition from the works of the blind Greek poet Homer to the modernist interpretations of the myth of Tiresias, exploited in masterpieces such as Ezra Pound’s The Cantos (1917), Thomas Stearns Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) or Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928). It is generally assumed that all literatures are embedded in a complex system of intertextuality and indebted to foreign traditions; as Saglia notes, “it is impossible to discuss [English] Renaissance

2

theatre and poetry, Restoration drama or the eighteenth century novel without referring to the Italian sonnet, French and Spanish drama, Cervantes and picaresque fiction” (2019: 3).

The concepts of appropriation and cross-fertilization have always been important to the arts and, more particularly, they were the real essence of the nineteenth century. It was after 1815 that

[…] the reopening of commercial and travel routes, new advances in the production and circulation of printed materials and evolving diplomatic and military developments brought about a remarkable expansion in British contacts with Continental literatures.

At the same time, the impact of these foreign traditions became more and more significant, so that they came to exert considerable influence on critical discourse and original literary production alike. (p. 3)

It emerges that the most revolutionary aspects of an extensive period, which goes from the Romantic and post-Napoleonic era to the Victorian age, are the “curiosity about exotic civilizations”, the consequent exploration of outputs from other societies (p. 3), as well as the spread of literacy and the expansion of potential audience for literature. Newspapers were probably the most important source of information but, as Brantlinger interestingly notes, also lectures, advertising, panoramas or museums played important roles in the circulation of knowledge about the empire and its colonies (2016: 245).

Reading became real business: technological developments such as lithography or rotary printing, and the more general advent of electricity made the making of paper, binding or transporting goods cheaper and faster. Moreover, circulating and subscription libraries and book clubs allowed readers from all social and economic position to borrow new publications.

As Patten notes,

Industry spewed out millions of pages imprinted with instructions about the workplace, order forms and receipts, brochures and advertisements. Families, often separated because of distant work opportunities, flooded the post with letters. Schools that taught the basics of literacy necessary to survive in a print world needed textbooks. Periodicals attracted every kind of reader and interest. […] and the British exported their language, traditions, and culture overseas, to North America, Asia, British protectorates and colonies in Africa and the Pacific, as well as many non-anglophone locales that nonetheless avidly consumed information and stories about the United Kingdom. (2016:

481)

As a result, literary and cultural influences moved back and forth within Europe and abroad. In this context, as Patten points out, “print was at least as important to ‘rule, Britannia’ as its military and merchant fleets, its factories, and the queen’s subjects serving the empire at home

3

and abroad” (p. 481). Tourists and explorers¹ in general, and more significantly diplomats, scholars or missionaries, who travelled to Eastern countries as active agents of British Imperialism, played a relevant role too in this process of cultural mediation.

Between 1780 and 1830 the British Empire began to expand, and travellers left to map unknown countries such as Singapore, India and Hong Kong; direct diplomatic, military and cultural contacts between Britain and the East intensified, allowing the exchange of goods and commodities. In 1876 Queen Victoria was named empress of India and many British people considered the imperial mission a moral responsibility. Explorations enabled scholars such as Sir William Jones to study Oriental history, linguistics, archaeology and translation, so that the knowledge of foreign countries became more and more accurate.

As a result, exploration became a key aspect of contemporary literary production and specifically of adventure fiction (Brantlinger 2016: 264), which staged the experiences of sailors and soldiers fighting in various colonial wars.² Kim, the thirteen-year-old orphan from Kipling’s picaresque novel, is presumably “the most interesting boy hero in Victorian and Edwardian adventure fiction” (p. 246). As Young points out, though the protagonist of the narrative was born in India, he does not entirely belong to any of the Indian cultures represented by the author (2010: 7). If in most cases narratives began at the end of the character’s journey, as for the Victorians “existence meant existence in England”, this was not true for Kipling or for Conrad (p. 46). In his Last Essays (1926), the author of Heart of Darkness (1899) and Lord Jim (1900) wrote that “it never occurs to him [the writer] that a book is a deed, that the writing of it is an enterprise as much as the conquest of a colony” (1926: 197): the process of composition always means visiting, invading and conquering a foreign country, history and tradition. Accused of being supporters of Britain’s imperialist ambitions and the civilising mission,³ the two writers were considered “foreigners wearing odd clothes” cultivating “an exotic air” (Raskin 1971: 49), thus outsiders who represented the lives of insiders and who wrote about cultures other than their owns (Young 2010: 7).⁴ Nowadays, the novels of these

1 In The Beaten Track, James Buzard pits the “tourist” against the “traveller”, depicting the first one as more vulgar and ignorant than the second, and emphasising the importance of travelling for the formation of Victorian social identities. For further discussion on the subject see Buzard, 1993.

2 In The Historical Novel Jerome de Groot mentions authors such as Frederick Marryat, G. A. Henty, R. M.

Ballantyne, C. S. Forester, Richard Woodman, Bernard Cornwell, Patrick O’Brian, Simon Scarrow and Dudley Pope (p. 78). See de Groot, 2010.

3 See Said, 1993.

4 It is important to bear in mind that, though they are both considered great British novelists, Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling were born in Berdyčiv (Russian Empire) and Bombay (India) respectively. Therefore, they represented splitting identities. This is in line with the important premise that first person experience is necessary to write effectively about it (Young 2010: 58).

4

two strangers are considered an invaluable source of more great literature, especially produced by Indian writers (p. 110).

Other novelists and poets demonstrated to be keen on an exoticism not necessarily associated with the Orient. Since early modern literature, the countries bordering the Mediterranean have always captured the Anglo-American imagination; Greek, Spanish or Italian cities have constituted very remote settings with respect to what was strictly considered Western, in terms of geography and culture. Venice, for instance, was “fascinating not only because of the Romantic attraction to ‘beauty in decay’ […], but also because of the ambiguity and paradox that inform its geographical as well as its cultural heritage” (Seaboyer 1997: 483).

More in general, Italy cast its spell over several generations of writers, offering them a variety of patterns, designs, plots and motifs. In many of their works, Britons extolled its “inspiring beauty” and “sublime landscapes”, its history and art (O’Connor 1957: 1, 2). John Addington Symonds’ Renaissance in Italy, published in seven volumes between 1875 and 1886, served as a baedeker for English and American explorers of the southern country, and as a reliable source of literary and historic information and aesthetic considerations on Italian art (Quondam 2006:

297).⁵ Like many other compendia and travel guides, it certainly contributed to fostering the so-called “lure of Italy” (p. 27), to attracting English intellectuals and to constructing a basic image of the country outside the country, represented, in O’Connor’s terms, as a “romanticised and feminized ‘other’” (1957: 4).

By writing her juvenilia, for instance, Charlotte Brontë became “an imaginary traveller in ‘the sweet south’” (Alexander 2010: 153). She never visited Italy, but she devoured Lord George Gordon Byron and Ann Radcliffe’s works about the country; she read newspapers and observed how it had been represented in the visual arts; thus she “absorbed the formulaic notions of Italy’s past grandeur and present beauty, and the conventional nineteenth-century prejudices against Italians and their country, and then transposed them into her writing” (pp.

152-3). Other Victorians really moved to the country. The number of travellers in Italy significantly increased in the first half of the nineteenth century, in parallel with the reopening of commercial routes and the development of transport systems. The first communities of English people began to appear, especially in Florence, and the first Romantics such as Lord Byron, John Keats orPercy Bysshe Shelley decided to explore the country. But it was in the

5 Other volumes published by Symonds include An introduction to the study of Dante (1872), Sketches in Italy and Greece (1874), the translation from Italian of The Sonnets of Michael Angelo Buonarotti and Tommaso Campanella (1878), Sketches and Studies in Italy (1879) and others. Symonds’ critical works about literature and art history accompanied the development of the museum as a cultural institution, in line with the spirit of Western Civilization (Quondam 2006: 297).

5

Victorian age that the English became both protagonists and consumers of a literature for and about Italy (Quondam 2006: 27-8). Charles Dickens wrote of his own “small wanderings”

(1861: 250), describing the beauty of Naples and its surroundings in both his letters and in his 1846 Pictures from Italy, resorting to the same images when he wrote the Italian chapters of Little Dorrit (1855-57); to his book The Ionian Sea (1901), George Gissing added the subtitle

“Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy”, once again emphasising the erratic dimension of his travels (Chialant 2010: 90, 92); like her heroines, George Eliot travelled to Rome and Florence, and her experiences constituted the raw material for the Italian chapters of Romola (1862-3), Middlemarch (1871) or Daniel Deronda (1876), in which she depicts the daily life “of a distant country and time”, and in which her cosmopolitanism converges with scenes of domestic life and education (Bonfiglio 2010: 143, 146).

British people’s interest in Italy and the idea of a unified nation-state, complemented by an increasing sense of duty towards the construction of a nation, gave voice to “one of the most fruitful cultural dialogues that helped to shape modern Italian identity” (Jossa and Pieri 2016:

6). Certainly, the craving for news and the reading of information from abroad facilitated an attitude of openness towards the Italian culture and the Risorgimento. Crisafulli throws into relief that the passion for one own’s country also meant fondness for foreign traditions; these were useful to dispel the multiple forms of pressure exercised within the national boundaries and to propagate models of freedom among the other downtrodden nations (2013: 2). Crisafulli interestingly mentions Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone’s commitment to the translation of Dante Alighieri’s poetry and of Alessandro Manzoni’s Cinque Maggio (p. 4), and specifically insists on the engagement of women writers with the Italian national cause:

Elizabeth Barrett Browning or Christina Rossetti directly lived the Unification process and wrote about it, calling attention to the significance of gendered representations in nineteenth- century literature, even at an international level (p. 5). For instance, in Casa Guidi Windows (1851), Barrett Browning always employs the first-person plural pronoun and uses expressions such “we thinkers”, “we hopers”, “we poets”, underlining the common sense of patriotism combined with a feeling of betrayal and failure she shared with “our Italians”. In addition, she alludes to Italy’s current situation and past history to comment upon transnational themes, like Great Britain’s imperialist policies, Europe’s political strategies and themes such as slavery or colonialism (Baiesi 2013: 119, 124). Conversely, Christina Rossetti distances herself from Barrett Browning, and in texts such as “En route”, “Italia, Io ti Saluto” or “Enrica 1865” (all

6

written in 1865), draws attention to the contradictions of her own self splitting between two identities: the English and the Italian one (Farese 2013: 168-74).

This multicultural identity was a distinguishing mark of another prolific British writer and translator, Violet Page. Born in France to British parents, she spent most of her life in Florence and wrote a number of critical volumes about the Italian Renaissance and aesthetics, as well as novels and short stories, under the pseudonym of Vernon Lee.⁶ Her British acquaintances permitted her to be introduced to the circles of Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic London. In 1887, she spent her holidays with the poet, novelist and translator Mary Robinson:

together, they went to Venice,⁷ where they met Gabriele D’Annunzio. As Pieri clarifies:

Despite the fact that Vernon Lee did not embrace the Pre-Raphaelite cause and was rather critical of most of the English Pre-Raphaelite painters, she nevertheless had an important role in the early phase of the diffusion of the movement in Italy. Her acquaintance with the London Aesthetic and Pre-Raphaelite milieu was remarkable in Italy at the time and must have fuelled the interest of her Italian friends. (2007: 35) As a matter of fact, she became a regular contributor to the new series of the literary periodical Cronaca bizantina (1881-6), when D’Annunzio became its editor (pp. 35, 60). The Abruzzese writer was a leading figure in the scene as well, since he gathered around his periodical all those who wrote about English Pre-Raphaelitism and were in contact with the second generation of the movement in London (p. 60). Other personages such as the literary and art critic Walter Pater, the copyist and patron Charles Fairfax Murray, or the Italian cultural mediators Carlo Placci and Enrico Nencioni played important roles within this web of contacts as well. Hence, as the present study will attempt to demonstrate in the following sections, the English movement of Pre-Raphaelitism was attracting Italian artists and literati, while Britons were developing a passion for the Italian national cause. In the meanwhile, D’Annunzio’s oeuvre was circulating abroad, somehow counterbalancing the influences which Italy was receiving from Great Britain.

Saglia describes in detail the reception of Italian literature in Romantic Britain, the increase of translations of medieval and Renaissance classics and an unprecedented interest in

6 Along with John Addington Symonds, she was considered an authority on the Italian Renaissance; among her works about Italy, it is worth mentioning Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (1880), Euphorion (1884), Renaissance Fancies and Studies (1895), Ariadne in Mantua: a Romance in Five Acts (1903), The Spirit of Rome (1906), Ravenna and Her Ghosts (1907) or The Sentimental Traveller. Notes on Places (1908).

7 Venice is an important element in D’Annunzio’s prose, especially in Il Fuoco: the city, energetic and opulent, is the symbol of Stelio Effrena’s conception of art and beauty.

7

continental masterpieces, such as Ugo Foscolo’s Le ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (1802), translated in 1814 under the title The Letters of Ortis to Lorenzo.⁸ Holland House was the epicentre of such intellectual activity, a “ veritable cultural magnet” which attracted visitors and intellectuals from all over the world, including Foscolo himself. Translators concentrated on the political sonnets of Petrarch, Giovanni Luigi Redaelli or Vincenzo da Filicaja that offered a reflection on that common sense of indignation for the current social and political situation in Europe and within Britain itself. Moreover, the translation activity demonstrated “the tendency of Holland House intellectuals to read history into texts, to read texts as history, and to employ translation as a means to access and analyse these intersections” (2019: 110-31). This implies that Italy’s poetry was widely appreciated abroad, especially at the beginning of the century, and continued to be admired even in the following decades. The reason for the Victorians’

interest in the Italian political cause was also due to their readings and instruction, to what the Romantics had previously studied and published. On the other hand, it is hard to talk about a novel tradition in nineteenth-century Italian literature, yet D’Annunzio’s fiction writing was a major breakthrough worthy of consideration. Probably only Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed (whose first English translation, by Charles Swan, appeared in 1828) represented one of the few exceptions to the rule, as it proved to be extremely influential upon foreign novelists, specifically upon Charles Dickens and his writing of A Tale of Two Cities (1859).

So, nineteenth-century Europe was the framework of cultural encounters, clashes, dialogues, conflicts and continuing influences, an overlapping of traditions with elastic and flexible boundaries. The Italian city of Fiume stood as a sort of microcosm of the continent. In the aftermath of World War I and the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, the town was contested between the Kingdom of Italy and that of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, so D’Annunzio marched to Fiume in order to annex it to Italy. By the time its occupation came to an end, the leader of the endeavour was not just a distinguished political figure, but also an eminent personage in the Italian and international literary context.

In her 2013 biography of the author, Hughes-Hallett keenly examines this ambivalent and enigmatic man. The title of the book alludes to the epithet that Romain Rolland gave to the writer: “the pike”. A passage of this first part deserves special attention:

D’Annunzio’s story is worth telling for reasons beyond his great talent and his life’s drama, lurid and eventful though it is. It illustrates a strand of cultural history which has

8 He also mentions Henry Francis Cary’s The Vision of Dante (1814), Mary Smirke’s, William Stewart Rose’s Orlando Furioso (1823-31), and Jeremiah Holmes Wiffen’s Jerusalem Delivered (1824-5) (p. 110).

8

its apparently innocuous origins in the classical past, passes through the marvels of the Renaissance and the idealism of early nineteenth-century Romanticism, but which leads eventually to the jackboot and the manganello, the fascist club. D’Annunzio read voraciously in several languages. He was adept at reviving neglected ideas whose time had come round again and he could spot a developing trend at the very moment of its formation. […] His flair for sensing what was new and influential moved Romain Rolland (a friend who became an enemy) to liken him to a pike, a predator lurking

‘afloat and still, waiting for ideas’. He was repeatedly accused of plagiarism, with some justice. He was a brilliant pasticheur, adopting and adapting the techniques of each new writer whose work impressed him. He wrote like Verga, he wrote like Flaubert, he wrote like Dostoevsky. (p. 11)

There is abundant evidence that this author perfectly fit the context previously described. He was at ease in this intricate and stimulating reticulation of cultural dialogues.

As far as his role as a pike is concerned, Hughes-Hallett continues by pointing out that

[…] more intelligent critics noticed that he didn’t imitate so much as appropriate. When he saw something that could nourish his intellect drifting by on the current, he would snap at it, pike-like, and swallow it, and send it forth again better expressed. He borrowed but he also anticipated. (p.11)

Interesting insights into the notion of “appropriation” emerge in Young’s Cultural Appropriation and the Arts, where the concepts of “cultural appropriation” or “content appropriation” are defined as “the reuse of an idea first expressed in the work of an artist from another culture” (2010: 6). However, defining a culture, and identifying whether an individual is an insider or an outsider with respect to a given civilization, is extremely difficult. As a consequence, it would be problematic to ascertain whether an act of cultural appropriation has occurred or not, and whether it could be considered a theft, thus something “unjustifiably offensive” (pp. 1-31).

Often artists do not succeed in creating works of art, as they steal in a “clumsy and ineffective manner” and produce something inauthentic, whereas others “appropriate content and create masterpieces” (p. 28). This was the specific case of D’Annunzio, who borrowed from foreign traditions and then returned everything to other cultures, through the efforts of cultural mediators:

Poets nowadays are of interest only to a minority. But d’Annunzio was a poet, novelist and playwright at a time when a writer could attract a mass following, and deploy significant political influence. […] When he gave readings, agents of foreign powers attended, fearful of his influence. When he wrote polemical poems, Italy’s leading newspaper cleared the front page and published them in full. (Hughes-Hallett 2013: 8)

9

As a neo-Romantic poet, D’Annunzio spent “much of his twenties writing erotic lyrics in archaic verse-forms and Frenchified fiction” (p. 9); thereafter, influenced by avant-garde cultural movements, he became one of the most influential aesthetes of the fin de siècle; finally, as he matured, he began to write political literature, and emerged as one of the most inspiring man of letters of his times.

10 Chapter 1

Shaping of nineteenth-century novel in Great Britain and Italy: mutual influences and the role of Gabriele D’Annunzio as literary mediator

1.1 The modern novel: origins and consolidation in Great Britain and Italy

In 1936, an essay entitled “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov”

appeared in the periodical Orient und Okzident. The study’s primary purpose was to analyse the works of the Russian author Nikolaj Leskov, but it was also destined to become a milestone in the history of literary criticism regarding the act of narrating. In the fifth section of the text, the author Walter Benjamin distinguishes storytelling, strictly connected to the oral tradition, from writing novels, a practice that became more accessible after the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century (Benjamin 2011: 23).

Authors have always been interested in drawing a picture of the origins of the novel. In The Progress of Romance of 1785, Clara Reeve presents a fictitious conversation between three friends who discuss prose literature. As the dialogue progresses, one of them, Euphrasia, defines the romance as a “heroic fable, - a fabulous Story of such actions as are commonly ascribed to heroes, or men of extraordinary courage and abilities” (Reeve 1785: 13), whereas the novel is

“a picture of real life and manners, and of the times in which it is written” (p. 111). More in detail,

The Novel gives a familiar relation of such things, as pass every day before our eyes, such as may happen to our friend, or to ourselves; and the perfection of it, is to represent every scene, in so easy and natural manner, and to make them appear so probable, as to deceive us into a persuasion (at least while we are reading) that all is real, until we are affected by the joys or distresses, of the persons in the story, as if they were our own.

(p. 111)

Hence, the novel’s primary purpose is to depict believable, if possible authentic images of situations from common life, to describe the individuals’ feelings and sensations in order to allow readers to escape from their own egotistical boundaries. Literature, in general, is the finest tool of identification with others, that enables human beings to grow and mature.

11

A few decades later, Sir Walter Scott provided a similar definition of the two forms of writing in his “Essay on Romance” (1824): according to him, the romance is “a fictitious narrative in prose or verse, the interest of which turns upon marvellous and uncommon incidents” and the novel “a fictious narrative, differing from the Romance, because the events are accommodated to the ordinary train of human events, and the modern state of society”

(1834: 129). Epic poetry and chivalric romance exhibit some similarities with the novel, but in a note in his essay, Scott quotes a passage from the Quarterly Review,⁹ highlighting that if the first two forms recreate a world of wonders populated by heroic and fantastic characters, the novel attempts to imitate real life (p. 130).

Through the words of the participants in the conversation, Reeve underlines the difficulty in classifying works as novels or romances because “they partake of the nature of both”, even though she considers them “as of a different species from either, as works singular and original” (1785: 127). This is in line with Scott’s statement that it is often difficult to assign a composition “precisely or exclusively” to one class or the other (1834: 130).

Prose genres such as news, biographies, travelogues and romances were commonplace from the medieval period, but it is generally assumed that the European novel tradition begun in 1604 with Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote de la Mancha (published in English in 1612),¹⁰ followed by the works of Paul Scarron in France and Madame de La Fayette’s The Princess of Clèves (1678) which came out in English in 1679. Discussing the development of the genre in England, Reeve pays special attention to early female writers such as Aphra Behn, author of Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave (1688), Delarivier Manley and Eliza Haywood (1785:

117-21), who became part of the so-called “fair triumvirate of wit”. However, as Watt notes, it was not until the eighteenth century that the usage of the term “novel” was established in order to indicate a literary form characterised by a high degree of realism (1968: 10). He continues by asserting that

If the novel were realistic merely because it saw life from the seamy side, it would be only an inverted romance; but in fact it surely attempts to portray all the varieties of human experience, and not merely those suited to one particular literary perspective: the novel’s realism does not reside in the kind of life it presents, but in the way it presents it. (p. 11)

9 See Quarterly Review, vol. 1, p. 305.

10 Reeve alludes to the year 1613 (1785: 113).

12

Therefore, the novel could be considered a modern genre since it distances itself from traditional literature (mainly Greek and Latin) which concentrated on plots taken from mythology, history or legends. Eighteenth-century writers differed from Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare or John Milton because they concentrated on individual experiences (1968: 14, 15). Realism, the objective and impartial representation of contemporary reality and, even more ambitiously, of the whole human reality, became the most important aspect of the novel (Asor Rosa 2016b: 568).

It is generally accepted that the great masters of such works were Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, though Reeve also mentions Bishop Berkeley as the possible author of Gaudentio di Lucca (1785: 125).¹¹ Defoe’s first-person account Robinson Crusoe (1719) is considered “the first fictional narrative in which an ordinary person’s daily activities are the centre of continuous literary attention” (Watt 1968: 76).

The preface to the book is worthy of mention since it is indicative of a new tendency in the practice of writing:

The Story is told with Modesty, with Seriousness, and with a religious Application of Events to the Uses to which wise Men always apply them (viz.) to the Instruction of others by this Example, and to justify and honour the Wisdom of Providence in all the Variety of our Circumstances, let them happen how they will. The Editor believes the thing to be a just History of Fact; neither is there any Appearance of Fiction in it: And however thinks, because all such things are dispatch’d, that the Improvement of it, as well as the Diversion, as to the Instruction of the Reader, will be the same; and as such he thinks, without farther Compliment to the World, he does them a great Service in the Publication. (Defoe 2008: 1)

The novel’s fictitious editor clearly emphasises that the story is told with “Seriousness” and accuracy, and that it could instruct the reader. Defoe pays special attention to the main character’s individualism, to his dependence on society and “the opportunity and the need of building up a network of personal relationships on a new and conscious pattern” (Watt 1968:

96). Therefore, Robinson Crusoe inaugurated a new season in the writing of fiction, corroborated by Moll Flanders published in 1722. The book similarly reflects contemporary social changes and, in its “treatment of plot, character, and total literary structure”, once again demonstrates a close relationship “to the forces of individualism” (p. 100).

As Watt explains, the concept of “individualism” was obviously associated with the idea of egocentrism and uniqueness. Following the great English empiricists of the seventeenth

11 The complete title of the novel is Le Avventure di Gaudenzio di Lucca.

13

century (Sir Francis Bacon, John Locke and Thomas Hobbes), “individualism” also came to indicate a person’s autonomy and freedom of choice in contemporary society (pp. 62-3). The Restoration brought vast changes in Great Britain, which became a single nation after 1707 and attained a certain political stability. There was also a great shift into modernisation in the name of industrial capitalism. The ideas of liberty, self-reliance, emancipation and rights permitted people to participate in Britain’s thriving and stimulating cultural life.

All these changes also contributed to directing the reader’s attention to the “inner lives”

of characters, to their private experiences and to “the complexities of their personal relationships” (p. 208). The difference between Don Quixote and Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856), for instance, is that the French masterpiece is not only realistic in the presentation of its characters and situations, but it also concentrates on their inner lives and the contexts “in a more pervasive and enduring sway than the romance” (p. 213). Hence, between the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, the reader came to empathise with the protagonist of the story, and identification became not only easier, but also insidious. As Siti explains, “the hero is similar to us, he or she plunges us into introspection and invites us to regard our psyche as terra incognita” (2006: 107). Samuel Richardson, in particular, was keen on investigating

“the double meaning of domesticity” (McMurran 2009: 533) and the characters’ intimate feelings.

After the 1740s, in spite of a metromanie considered “infectious” (Stewart 2013: 120),¹² the novel became popular, since

It satisfies the romantic aspirations of its readers in a literary guide which gives so full a background and so complete an account of the minute-by-minute details of thought and sentiment that what is fundamentally an unreal flattery of the reader’s dreams appears to be the literal truth. […] it pretends to be something else [than the romance], and, mainly owing to the new power which accrued to formal realism as a result of the subjective direction which Richardson gave it, it confuses the differences between reality and dream more insidiously than any previous fiction. (Watt 1968: 212-3).

The Romantic period witnessed a re-evaluation of verse-tales about chivalry, adventure and love; poets resorted to songs and ballads, and in general it was believed that all poetry was “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” (Coleridge and Wordsworth 2008: 175). Gothic novels, like Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1765), William Beckford’s Vathek (1786)

12 During the first two decades of the nineteenth century, in particular, there was a certain enthusiasm for metrical composition. The phenomenon was labelled “metromania” by Blackwood’s Magazine. For further discussion see Morrison and Roberts, 2013.

14

or Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk (1796), achieved great success, but reading novels was generally considered vulgar, “sensational and demeaning” because the genre was constantly in dialogue with prose romance, which traditionally dealt with “feminine perfection and mythical elements” (De Groot 2010: 14). Watt, too, notes that the number of novels published between 1770 and 1800 did not mean an increase in quality, unless we consider figures such as Tobias Smollett, Laurence Sterne and Fanny Burney (1968: 302).

In the general preface to the 1829 edition of the first modern historical novel Waverley (1814), Scott tries to defend his work from accusations of frivolity and femininity explaining that the collage of explanatory notes and information was used because

[…] the reader should have reason to complaint that the information communicated was of a general and merely nominal character. It remains to be tried whether the public (like a child to whom a watch is shown) will, after having been satiated with looking at the outside, acquire some new interest in the object when it is opened, and the internal machinery displayed to them. (Scott 2008: 360)

It is clear that the author’s primary purpose is to instruct and educate the reader, emphasising his own authority as a writer.

During the same period, Jane Austen was publishing her masterpieces, demonstrating that women were becoming increasingly important in the literary scene. As Watt points out,

“she completed the work that Fanny Burney had begun”, exploring the “social and moral problems raised by economic individualism” and analysing the social system and the role of women (especially in relation to the institution of marriage) more acutely than Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding. Therefore, Austen demonstrated that “feminine sensibility was in some ways better equipped to reveal the intricacies of personal relationships and was therefore at a real advantage in the realm of the novel” (1968: 310).

The eighteenth century was a key period for the consolidation of the novel as a serious genre, in the sense that “secret reality replaces the marvelous” and “indiscretion takes the place of escapism” (Siti 2006: 109); anyway, the nineteenth century was a major turning point.

Discussing American fiction, Baym more generally notes that “like other major literary forms, the novel was thought to represent the spirit of its age; and the spirit of the nineteenth century consisted of the emergence of the people as a political and cultural force” (1984: 44). Moreover, the novel became the most appropriate way of expression for women: in addition to Jane Austen, also the Brontës, George Eliot and Elisabeth Gaskell were also major authors who

15

helped to define the genre.¹³ As a matter of fact, Baym continues asserting that “The novel is at home in the home’s heart, with the children and the women. […] This connection between family and fiction is the one most frequently on the reviewers’ minds” (p. 49). However, whether written by women or men, the novel was an extremely fertile form of entertainment and a way of portraying multifaceted contemporary society.

From this short literary excursus, it is evident that the British played a fundamental role in the early development of the novel. Nevertheless, Park remembers how Margaret Doody, in The True Story of the Novel, “corrects literary historical shortsightedness in geographical and national attributions” and reconstructs the history of the genre, demonstrating that it is a common product of Europe and the Orient. In her opinion, “the English performed a wonderful trick in persuading themselves that ‘The Rise of the Novel’ took place in England in the eighteenth century”,¹⁴ even though they unquestionably contributed to the creation of “its fringe variants” (Park 2010: 44-5).

In any case, data show that British novels and short-stories were widely appreciated not only within the country, but around nineteenth-century Europe too. In Italy, a series of novels by Scott came out in centres like Padua, Parma and Macerata. Samuel Richardson and Daniel Defoe reappeared after a period of absence. In addition, the works of Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Frederick Marryat (together with those by Alexandre Dumas and Honoré de Balzac) formed part of a collana entitled “Romanzi e curiosità di tutte le nazioni”, published by the Milanese Truffi. In Venice, Picotti published Opere di Maria di Edgeworth in 1824, and “Raccolta di romanzi storici di Walter Scott, nuova traduzione veneta” between 1835 and 1836 (Ragone 2006: 469-74).

In Ragone’s opinion, the explosion of the novel in the peninsula occurred in the years between the Congress of Vienna and the Risorgimento. In that period, foreign fiction was regularly published in cities such as Milan, Rome and Naples, with a predominance of the Scottian historical novel. This means that in eighteenth-century Great Britain and France, the novel was the most appropriate expression of the middle-class. In Italy, instead, the situation was stagnant from a social and cultural perspective. There was still a distinction between élite and common people, the volgo; hence, the consolidation of the Italian novel was faint and the term “romanzo” was still used to indicate the verse-poem (Tellini 1998: 1-5).

13 Like Scott, George Eliot tries to defend the novel from accusations of stupidity and frivolity in her 1856 essay

“Silly Novels by Lady Novelists”.

14 See Doody, 1997.

16

Italians were considered role models until Giambattista Marino, both in poetry and in fiction. Reeve notes that the term “novel” derives from the Italian novella, which means “new story”, and that “the Italians were the first that excelled in Novel-writing” (1785: 112). Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, in particular, became a literary model for future generations of fiction writers, in Italy and Europe. Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1348-1400), Matteo Bandello’s Quattro libri delle novelle (1485-1561) or Miguel de Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares (1547-1616) are some of the heirs to Boccaccio’s fortune. As Asor Rosa claims, the writer became inimitable, not only because he chose an original and innovative form of storytelling, but especially because he put the human being and his intellectual and emotional qualities at the centre of his worldview (Asor Rosa 2016a: 358).

In a significant letter to Celestino Bianchi, Ruggiero Bonghi stated that Italian literature

[…] fu in questa parte superiore alla francese fino a Cartesio; all’inglese fino forse a’tempi di Anna. E fu studiata e seguita e imitata di là dalle Alpi, poiché non vi trovava né compagne né rivali. E bada che così i Francesi come gl’Inglesi, anche in que’tempi, nei quali gli scrittori nostri erano in gran reputazione presso di loro, avevano essi stessi degli scrittori che in parecchie parti di rilievo superavano i nostri. Di fatti, abbiamo o avevamo noi nulla che in vivacità di stile, in verità d’espressione, in varietà di concetti e in sincerità e perfezione di corrispondenza collo spirito del proprio paese valesse il Montaigne? No di certo: […] (1884b: 39-40)

In spite of this, according to Bonghi, the French and the English soon became able to accurately follow the ancient Italian literary models and to give their writing a particular concreteness (p.

41).

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, when Daniel Defoe was publishing Robinson Crusoe in Great Britain, inaugurating the entrance of the novel within the contemporary literary scenario, Italian culture was observing a severe crisis, regarding literary, philosophical, artistic and scientific aspects, due to internal and external causes. Indeed, in another letter, Bonghi asserts that

I libri italiani hanno in Italia un molto minor numero di lettori che i francesi in Francia, i tedeschi in Germania, e gl’Inglesi in Inghilterra. E i libri, intendo, di qualunque genere, gravi e leggieri sono letti meno: e meno in quale proporzione non lo so, né m’importa dire. E non è già che in Italia si legga assolutamente meno che altrove; si leggono meno i libri nostri; e a quel soprappiù di lettori a cui i libri nostri o non bastano o non piacciono, suppliscono quelle tre altre letterature. […] Ci pare, con un libro francese o inglese, di trovarci più a casa e in compagnia d’amici che con un libro nostro. Almeno questo è il sentimento della maggior parte de’ lettori, e soprattutto delle lettrici. (1884a:

2)

17

In Bonghi’s opinion, as he wrote in his sixth letter to Bianchi, the major problem of Italian writers was their laziness. However, it is worth remembering that after 1640, the most important figures of the Baroque, such as Paolo Sarpi, Tommaso Campanella and Galileo Galilei died and Giambattista Marino, considered the pioneer of an experimental approach to literature, had short-lived success. At the same time, the Church of Rome launched its counteroffensive to take complete control of contemporary culture. The new generation of writers (Emanuele Tesauro, Matteo Peregrini, Sforza Pallavicino, or Vincenzo da Filicaja) directed research towards something innovative, opening a rift within the regular development of national literary history. They returned to a classicist style and conception, healing the fracture with Renaissance Humanism, which was considered the noblest phase of Italian culture. From that moment onwards, until the Romantic era and even later, with Giosuè Carducci and Gabriele D’Annunzio, Italianness and classicism corresponded (Asor Rosa 2016b: 151-3). With the establishment of the Accademia dell’Arcadia, founded in Rome in 1690, Homer, Dante and Petrarch became role models in the attack against the redundant Baroque and Rococo styles, then dominant in art and literature. Simplicity, refinement and measure, mythological and classic references, and praises to courtesy were the main features of Italian poetry from the end of the seventeenth century until the beginning of the nineteenth (p. 172).

Contemporaries could reach the perfection of the ancients: this was the bedrock principle of the age of Enlightenment, a movement which arose in England, developed in France and soon spread out all over Europe. In Italy, it represented a moment of transformation and Europeanisation of Italian culture, which was extremely useful for national cultural recovery (p. 229). In the field of prose fiction, it was already possible to observe some aspects typical of Romanticism: in Vittorio Alfieri, egotistic and individualistic attitudes emerged, and sentiments of restlessness and melancholy became the most inspiring themes of poetry (pp. 292-4).

Alfieri’s Vita (1806), Carlo Goldoni’s Mémoires (1787) or Carlo Gozzi’s Memorie inutili (1797) are some examples of this tendency towards self-exploration and autobiography, which followed the British archetype. On the other hand, the form of the epistolary novel, made popular by Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), prepared the ground for one of the most important chapters of Italian fiction: Ugo Foscolo’s Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (1802).

Foscolo’s masterpiece is structured as a collection of letters that the protagonist sends to his friend Lorenzo Alderani. Therefore, as Tellini observes, the work is presented as a sort

18

of monologue, more akin to a poem rather than a novel; the story is filtered through the eyes of the first person and the dialogic element is completely absent (1998: 8). For the official consolidation of the novel form, the Italian culture had to wait for 1827 and the publication of the first historical novel, Alessandro Manzoni’s I Promessi sposi. This work was not in continuity with Foscolo’s volume, yet represented a deviation from it; it was a book destined to meet the expectations of the newly emerged middle-class (p. 17).

As a matter of fact, the social and political situation in Europe, after the fall of Napoleon, encouraged the sovereigns to return to the Ancien Régime and reinstate the situation before the French Revolution. After the Congress of Vienna of 1815, the idea of a community based upon fixed and static hierarchies vanished completely. So, with the rebellion, European society underwent a complete metamorphosis: a conflict between old and new classes erupted, the bourgeoisie acquired paramount importance and the working class began to make its voice heard, as Karl Marx described in his volumes (Asor Rosa 2016b: 314). Nineteenth-century Europe “entra trionfalmente nel ‘moderno’”, Asor Rosa writes (p. 317), but in Italy the process was slower and such sluggishness was mirrored in the cultural phenomena. In such a context, the novel proved to be the most natural and appropriate instrument for a national readership, as it could draw a picture about the past and internal patriotic ambitions.

The unfortunate Italian situation was portrayed in the historical novels of the period:

after I Promessi sposi, Tommaso Grossi followed Manzoni’s example publishing Marco Visconti in 1834; Cesare Cantú’s Margherita Pusterla came out in 1838 and was translated into a variety of languages; Massimo d’Azeglio employed the genre as a mean of civil education, with Niccolò de’ Lapi ovvero I Palleschi e i Piagnoni (1841), La Lega Lombarda (1845) and especially Ettore Fieramosca e la Disfida di Barletta (1833); Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi wrote historical novels such as La battaglia di Benevento or L’assedio di Firenze published in 1827-1828 and 1836 respectively, in which he alludes to adverse events of the Italian past. All of them helped to prepare the ground for subsequent developments, evident in authors such as Giosuè Carducci and Gabriele D’Annunzio (pp. 440-1).

Italy was still suffering from the consequences of its isolation and backwardness in relation to other European nations. Furthermore, while important innovations were taking place abroad, especially in France and England, Italy was struggling for its own political independence and the formation of a unified nation (pp. 565-6). As McMurran points out, the novel