Romanzi da leggere e da dimenticare: un’anomalia italiana del Settecento

This essay brings together recent literary critical studies on the eighteenth- century Italian novel with those on book history and on reading. What lay behind the distrust of the novel as a genre, impeding its development and its diffusion in Italy? Church censorship was not the sole reason for the difficulties the Italian novel faced in its emegence as a genre. The problems are a good deal more complex. It was not only the censors and the clergy who took a negative view of novels; writers themselves who had developed within the parameters of official culture failed to identify with the new form, one, moreover, which was intended to entertain. Literary historical studies in the last two decades enable book historians to connect this work on the texts of the novels with the cultural context in which certain printers and booksellers invested in a publishing genre which, despite the difficulties it faced, managed to create a significant market over the course of the eighteenth century, with numerous editions and counterfeit editions, above all of works by the two most celebrated authors of the time, Pietro Chiari and Antonio Piazza. Yet in order to create this market for the novel, publisher-booksellers in Italy were obliged to adopt complex promotional strategies, from pretending that these works were translations of successful French or English novels to penning elaborate introductions for readers in which they tried to reassure the detractors of the genre (conservative men of letters and eccclesiastical censors). An example is the Venetian printer Angelo Pasinelli, who in an Avviso al lettore prefixed to the edition of L’uomo o sia memorie, ed avventure del co, Di Senneval asserts that novels are merely a “pleasurable pastime” and are soon forgotten, leaving the mind free for more serious reading. They therefore present no danger to readers.