Experiential nostalgia, ironic homage, and literary awareness in the Italian gamebook

Abstract

This article offers an overview of the history of Italian gamebooks and interprets some of its most relevant traits. The form originated in the UK and the USA in the 1970s, and reached Italy through translations published mainly by Edizioni EL. The article shows how these translations shaped the perception of what gamebooks could and should be in Italy. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the market for gamebooks was so dominated by foreign authors that gamebooks written by Italians lacked visibility and continuity, and in some cases were manipulated to look like translations from foreign languages. While readers of gamebooks in the 1980s and early 1990s were mainly tweens and teens, early Italian gamebooks tended to target adult readers, and this, too, affected the circulation of the works. The article then proceeds to discuss the blooming of the gamebook among 21st-century Italian authors. These authors tend to borrow ideas mainly from foreign precedents rather than early Italian experiments, and they write for adults comprising the same readers who were young in the 1980s. The rich and developing world of the new Italian gamebooks is interpreted through the filter of three concepts: experiential nostalgia (which adds complexity to earlier models to ensure that now-adult readers face a comparable experience to the one they had back then); ironic homage (through which authors acknowledge their foreign models); and literary awareness (through the use of paratexts that frame their works as proper literary endeavors).