Glimpses of Resistance to Spanish (and Austrian) Rule: Reading I promessi sposi in a Transnational Frame

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In I promessi sposi, Manzoni provides, in his representations of Spanish relations of ruling, both glimpses of an economy that has begun to link to a world capitalist system and glimpses of resistance to this globalizing model. I investigate the continuity of this resistance from the time of the Spanish occupation (represented in the novel) to later archival texts that document Austrian efforts, in the Lombard countryside, to control the movements of malviventi and the spread of the cholera epidemic (1836). I suggest that, though Manzoni’s novel is indisputably a classic of Italian literature and European Romanticism, it can also be read productively against the grain of both national and regional literatures; as a work that resonates with other world literatures, the novel also represents alternatives to the nation, economy, and culture that were negotiated in Italian and other nationalist projects of the nineteenth century.