Alessandro Manzoni: A Critical Bibliography 1950-2000 by Augustus Pallotta

Abstract

MLR, 104.3, 2009 887 Alessandro Manzoni: A Critical Bibliography 1950-2000. By Augustus Pallotta. Pisa and Rome: Serra. 2007. 467 pp. 98. ISBN 978-88-6227-011-3. Professor of Italian at Syracuse University, Augustus Pallotta is one of themost re spected Manzonian scholars inNorth America. He has repeatedly studied theways inwhich Manzoni's work has been received by analysing the British and American translations of I promessi sposi and the Spanish translations of II cinque maggio and by writing an interesting account ofManzoni's success in nineteenth-century Catalonia. For more than two decades Pallotta has also analysed books and articles on Manzoni for the Garland yearly editions of The Romantic Movement: A Selec tive and Critical Bibliography. This new, detailed, and ambitious bibliography on Manzoni?a reference text apt to inform and orient those who have an interest in Manzoni criticism' (p. xiii)?is therefore the culmination of a long dedication to Manzonian studies. It is a lengthy, carefully prepared, needed, and welcome book. Whereas Sil via Brusamolino Isella's and Simonetta Usuelli Castellani's Bibliografia manzoni anay 1949-1973 (Milan: II Polifilo, 1974), Giancarlo Rati's Alessandro Manzoni e la critica: 1973-1980' (in Cultura e scuolay 1981, pp. 27-41), and Mariella Gof fredo De Robertis's Bibliografia manzonianay 1980-1995 (Milan: Biblioteca nazio nale Braidense, 1998) cover only parts of the period taken into consideration by Pallotta, and whereas the Website Italinemo provides guidance for thepost-2000 bib liography, Pallotta systematically deals with the entire second half of the twentieth century (which he, as an Italianist, synthetically describes as post-Crocean) indicat ing, summarizing, and discussing a very large number of the relevant contributions made in these crucial years. Manzoni's best-known interpreters are all given ample room: JacquesGoudet (a fundamental contribution', p. 424), Natalino Sapegno ('the most concise and illuminating writing on the significance ofManzoni's presence in Italian life',p. 146), Ferruccio Ulivi (rightlypraised because, unlike most [. . .],he is not afraid to place God at the very heart ofManzoni's work', p. 154), as well as Anna Banti, Giorgio Barberi Squarotti, Enzo Noe Girardi, Ezio Raimondi, Vittorio Spinazzola, Paolo Valesio, and others. Pallotta may sometimes lose his temperwhen confronting themost provocative interpreters (Spranzi's views, he says, are patently absurd', and often rise to the level of sublime nonsense', p. 270), but all his other remarks aremeasured, sensible, and intelligently supported by constant references toManzoni's texts. Pallotta stresses the importance of the articles and monographs published in North America that still are, he says, 'with few exceptions, [. . .]virtually absent in Italian bibliographies' (p. xiv). Itwould indeed be difficult to discuss properly some key aspects ofManzoni's work without taking account of scholars such as Stanley Bernard Chandler and Olga Ragusa and their studies on the origins and meanings ofManzoni's metaphors and nineteenth-century Italian historical novels. Together with some of theirbest students inToronto and New York, these authors developed serious analyses ofManzoni's major texts in a cultural and religious context stimu latingly different from that of other manzonisti. Chandler, in particular, has been 888 Reviews able to study the spirituality of Ipromessi sposiwithout ever getting bogged down in the diatribes thathave divided clerical and anticlerical scholars in Italy or France; his Anglican background helped him to see the essential religious components of Manzoni's texts, to focus on theirhistorical development, and resolutely to set aside all secondary elements. Pallotta is admirably independent-minded: he repeatedly praises Chandler's 'sound judgement and consummate knowledge of the subjects' (p. 103), but ispuzzled by some aspects of his analysis (particularly by his overriding concern with moral and religious questions), and clearly says so (p. 101). Itwould be disingenuous to criticize the author of such a detailed bibliography forhaving leftaside a couple of useful contributions (I think, inparticular, ofMark Davie's 'Manzoni after 1848: An "Irresolute Utopian"?', MLR, 87 (1992), 847-57, and Giovanni Nencioni's La lingua diManzoni (Bologna, IIMulino, 1993)), since a few oversights were inevitable. Pallotta, on the contrary,must be congratulated for the considerable amount of information and stimulating ideas that he has so patiently provided for future scholars. The publications that he lists and analyses allow many...