Resistance to theory

The Italian literary establishment has always had a difficult relationship with the novel, and even more with the theory of the novel. “They do not have any novels as their English and French counterparts do”: so wrote Mme de Stäel, in her essay De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (On Literature Considered in its Relationship with Social Institutions, 1800). For this reason when de Stäel published “Sulla maniera e l'utilit à delle traduzioni” (“On the Manner and Usefulness of Translations,” 1816) in the Biblioteca italiana, she invited Italians to read foreign writers, especially English and German ones, advice that caused irate reactions in the tiny Italian literary world. In defending Italian literary tradition, some Italians argued that the absence of novels was a reason for pride, not embarrassment, as Mme de Stäel suggested.

During the eighteenth century, in fact, the novel was commonly blamed in Italy for committing three unforgivable sins. Morally, novels contained sentimental stories that might corrupt a public of readers made up of idle people, mainly women. Aesthetically, the novel was considered an inferior genre, since it was unknown to the golden centuries of Italian literature and did not enjoy the same dignity, conferred by rigorously codified forms, as epic or tragedy. Linguistically, the novel rejected the selected vocabulary of the Petrarchan tradition and opened the doors of literature to coarse subjects and language; moreover, as it was thought to be of foreign origin, it favored the corruption of the Italian language, particularly by the French language. During the eighteenth century in Italy the genre of the novel had been left to a few professional writers, to a public of low or middle-low social extraction, and to women: these three groups were treated by literary society with supreme contempt.