The nineteenth-century historical novel

Since the time of Napoleon's collapse, the historical novel has been an extremely popular genre. A type of narrative literature in prose, a fictional story set in a documented or documentable context which may also include actual persons who lived at the time, this genre has one foot in fact and the other in fiction, one in a kind of scholarship or erudition and the other in a kind of entertainment. Its purpose is to instruct and to divert. The heterogeneity of historical novels produced over time and in response to various audiences militates against a narratological, technical approach. The historical novel humanizes history and rediscovers land- and cityscapes.

In the history of Italian literature, historical fiction – whether in poetic and dramatic forms or in prose – preceded Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (1827 and 1840). One can refer to Manzoni’s own tragedies, Il Conte di Carmagnola (The Count of Carmagnola, 1820) and Adelchi (Adelchi, 1822), whose completion had been interrupted by the beginning of the novel, and to works originating in his Romantic circle in Milan: Tommaso Grossi’s Ildegonda (Ildegonda, 1820) and I Lombardi alla prima crociata (The Lombards in the First Crusade, 1826), both set at the time of the Crusades; or I profughi di Parga (The Exiles of Parga, 1823) by Giovanni Berchet (1783–1851), set in Albania during the struggle between the Turks and the English. One might also cite the earlier Platone in Italia (Plato in Italy, 1804–6) by Vincenzo Cuoco (1770–1823), who imagines that he has found a manuscript in which the Greek philosopher reported on a trip to Italy in pre-Roman times; or Alessandro Verri’s Notti romane al sepolcro degli Scipioni, a work indebted to the excavations that in 1780 brought to light two funerary inscriptions from the time of Scipio Africanus.