Promessi Sposi Research Articles

‘Far consentire l'animo di chi legge’: Manzoni, the novel and the issue of literary identification. Analysis of the digression on ‘romanzi d'amore’ in Fermo e Lucia

This article examines a passage from Alessandro Manzoni's Fermo e Lucia (1821–23), the so-called digression on ‘romanzi d'amore’, where Manzoni pondered the appropriateness of writing of love in novels. By analysing Manzoni's argument closely, in particular his statement that the danger lies in letting the readers identify with the feelings of the character and therefore confusing their world with that of fiction, the article aims to underline Manzoni's perspicacity in realising, first, that the dynamic of identification is at the heart of the novel and, secondly, that the new mode of reading introduced by the novel and based on empathic identification was going to throw into crisis the pedagogical and moralistic conception of art, of Platonic origin, in which he believed. Hence, the article looks at the digression on ‘romanzi d'amore’ as the first manifestation of Manzoni's rejection of the novel as a genre; not simply a formulaic repetition of the leitmotif of the novel as a corruptive genre but the beginning of a meditation that anticipated by almost 30 years the impasse declared by Manzoni in the essay Del romanzo storico (1850): a reflection on the novel within the novel which makes Manzoni's work – intended in its complexity from Fermo e Lucia to I promessi sposi – not only one of the best examples of self-reflexive novels but also an antinovel in the most radical sense of the word, that is a novel that disavows itself.

Noli me tángere. By José Rizal. Translated by Harold Augenbraum. New York: Penguin, 2006 (in Spanish, 1887). Pp. xxix+444.El filibusterismo. By José Rizal. Translated by Harold Augenbraum. New York: Penguin, 2011 (in Spanish, 1891). Pp. xxiii+339.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsNoli me tángere. By José Rizal. Translated by Harold Augenbraum. New York: Penguin, 2006 (in Spanish, 1887). Pp. xxix+444. El filibusterismo. By José Rizal. Translated by Harold Augenbraum. New York: Penguin, 2011 (in Spanish, 1891). Pp. xxiii+339.Barbara CelarentBarbara CelarentUniversity of Atlantis*Another review from 2054—Ed. Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Sociology Volume 121, Number 1July 2015 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/682558 Views: 217Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref For permission to reuse a book review printed in the American Journal of Sociology, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Stephanie Jed Glimpses of Resistance to Spanish (and Austrian) Rule: Reading I promessi sposi in a Transnational Frame, Italian Culture 37, no.11 (Jun 2019): 26–46.https://doi.org/10.1080/01614622.2019.1609209

Is it just too Catholic for us? The reception of I promessi sposi and the problem of religion and literature

This paper examines the American and Italian reception of Manzoni’s I promessi sposi. It places the American reception of Manzoni within a larger context of the anti-Catholic nativism that has pervaded American society and academe. The reception of Manzoni in Italy, in contrast, is marked by anti-clericism. The case study of Manzoni’s reception raises the larger issue of the role of the study of religion within the discipline of literary studies.

Cultures in Contact: Translation and Reception of I promessi sposi in 19th Century England

Cultures in Contact: Translation and Reception of I promessi sposi in 19th Century England

Non come un romanzo. Retoriche scolastiche ed educazione alla lettura

One of the long-term goals of literary education in secondary school should be the training of assiduous, capable and independent young readers. But, in reality, in Italian institutions reading education suffers from inadequate attention and ineffective and obsolete routines. This paper aims to highlight contradictions in scholastic rhetoric, both institutional and didactic, that cause the impressive amount of non-readers among young Italians: ministerial directives that lack in regulatory, theoretical, and methodological frameworks (the new Indicazioni Nazionali), but that sometimes exceed in requiring specific contents (the 'untouchable' Promessi sposi, a poetry-oriented canon); the structural conditions of the pedagogical apparatus (Massa 1987) that clash against the kind of fruition required from a novel, giving rise to common practices such as anthological fragmentation and an emphasis on text analysis and test-oriented didactics, rather than focusing on developing real and efficient reading skills. Finally, examples of didactic practices will be given, with the purpose of conciliating the necessary methodological accuracy and the acquisition of reading skills with a revaluation of reading pleasure and the experiential and essential value that it can and should have for every adolescent.

Reading the Interregnum: Anachronisms in Gordimer’s July’s People

Reading the Interregnum:Anachronisms in Gordimer’s July’s People Nasser Mufti (bio) There the phrase went beyond the content; here the content goes beyond the phrase. —Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire, 18. Nadine Gordimer’s novel July’s People famously ends with Maureen Smales running towards a helicopter whose contents may carry her “saviours or murderers” (158). The novel is set in the midst of a civil war between the apartheid government and black revolutionaries, and Maureen’s flight could signal equally the perseverance of the old regime or the arrival of South Africa’s postcolonial future. Either way, her final gesture promises a termination to what Gordimer described as an “interregnum,” a transitory stage between the two regimes. However, because of the ending’s deliberate and famous ambiguity, the text withholds the conclusion to this historical interstice. The question that the ending poses to the reader—indeed one that has troubled the novel’s critics since its publication—is how to read such an ending. The difficulty of reading in the interregnum is something that Maureen herself struggles with over the course of the novel. In an early chapter, she cannot finish reading a translation of Alessandro Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi because “the transport of the novel, a false awareness of being within another time, place and life that was the pleasure of reading, for [End Page 64] her, was not possible. She was in another time, place, consciousness” (29, emphasis original). Michael Neill has helpfully called this the Smales’s “temporal dislocation,” which refers to the disjuncture between epistemological and interpretive registers, where, for example, Maureen’s capacities for reading fall short because she is “in another time, place, consciousness” (73). This is not the fault of Manzoni’s novel but a symptom of the interregnum, for the narrator explains Maureen’s quandary as follows: “if [Maureen] did not read, they would find a solution soon; if she did read the book, they would still be here [in the interregnum] when it was finished” (28). Reading carries with it the danger that the interregnum will remain in transit and inconclusive by the time that she finishes the book. In other words, something about the interminability of the interregnum—its refusal to come to an end—calls for a way of reading that can endure how the historical interstice outlives the act of reading. Maureen’s anxiety about reading is itself dramatized for readers in the ending of July’s People, who like her must suspend the desire for resolution and endure what J. Hillis Miller has described as the “disquieting power” of “unreadability” (Reading Narrative 98). Gordimer borrows the concept of the interregnum from Antonio Gramsci—whose remarks on the term she uses for the epigraph of July’s People: “The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms” (276).1 The fact that the old “is dying” signals that its death is in the process, while the fact that “the new” cannot be born signals that its birth is deferred. A terminal past and embryonic future cohabit the interregnum, which suggests an impasse rather than a transition from one regime to another—much like what Walter Benjamin meant by a “present which is not a transition” (262). Gramsci’s formulation of the interregnum resists beginnings and endings, as it represents a state of paralyzed transit involving a simultaneous departure and arrival of two distinct eras. This notion is radically different than, for example, the iustituim that Giorgio Agamben discusses, which is “not defined as a fullness of powers, a pleromatic state of law, as in the dictatorial model, but as a kenomatic state, an emptiness and standstill of the law” (48). In Gramsci’s interregnum, law is not at a “standstill,” but is precisely what is contested—will it apply to the old or new regime? Similarly, one can distinguish the interregnum from the openness that Slavoj Žižek sees in the overthrow of Ceausescu in Romania. He describes “rebels waving [End Page 65] the national flag with the red star, the Communist symbol, cut out, so that instead of the symbol standing...

Cultures in Contact. Translation and Reception of I promessi sposi in 19th Century England

Cultures in Contact. Translation and Reception of I promessi sposi in 19th Century England

Cesare Cantù e Alessandro Manzoni

In 1882 Cesare Cantù published a lengthy tome entitled Alessandro Manzoni. Reminiscenze, thereby becoming one of the first to write a biography on the author of the Promessi sposi. In so doing, Cantù credited himself as being both a loyal companion to Manzoni throughout his literary pursuits and a reliable witness of the writer’s family history. Through an analysis of documents of the period, this article reconstructs the complex relationship between the two writers and sheds light on the reasons behind their final rupture after 1840, thus redefining on a more realistic scale the image which Cantù sought to convey of himself in the publication of the memoirs.

The Crowd and Manzoni’s Conception of Cultural Unification

Not only is Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi considered to be one of the greatest books in the history of Italian Literature, it could also be said to be the work which most contributed to the rise of Italian nationalism leading to unification. Manzoni’s role in forging an Italian national conscious is undeniable, his socio-political ideas transmitted through the novel having produced historically significant ideological codes. Critics have since scoured the pages of Manzoni’s writings in attempt to determine the ideological biases underlying the novel’s conception. Of these biases or determinants, the one that has received the most attention, ever since Antonio Gramsci’s comments on I Promessi Sposi, regards Manzoni’s “aristocratic” attitude towards the lower classes. What Manzoni describes as an animalesque mob is not strictly synonymous with members of the lower classes, but with crowds in general. His irascible, unpredictable, and irrational Milanese masses demonstrate his profound understanding of mass psychology and exemplify the key characteristics of crowds as defined in Gustave Le Bon’s book, The Crowd. Comparing this self-proclaimed scientific work with Manzoni’s literary work, my paper analyzes the episodes in I Promessi Sposi in which the Milanese (which Manzoni had previously established to be “buoni figliuoli, nominati per la bonta in tutto il mondo”) suddenly “imbestiali”[1], in order to thereby determine how Manzoni’s ideas regarding crowds informed his conception of unification. [1] Alessandro Manzoni, I Promessi Sposi, ed. Isabella Gherarducci and Enrico Ghidetti, (Florence: La Nuova Italia Editrice, 1990), 278.

A New Approach to an Old Question: On the Characters of Manzoni'sI PROMESSI SPOSI

The article engages in the critical debate on the interpretation of the system of characters in Alessandro Manzoni's I promessi sposi (1840). After a summary of some well-known schematic representations of the novel based on the function that the characters have in the development of the story (i.e., Italo Calvino 1973, Franco Fido 1974, Feruccio Ulivi 1974, and Angelo Marchese 1987), the article suggests a different approach to the question, based on the analysis of the occhiello, the illustration embellishing the title page of the 1840 edition of I promessi sposi. The image — based on an original drawing by the painter Francesco Gonin — is interpreted as a metaphorical representation of the relationships among characters developed by Manzoni.After an analytical description of the illustration, proposing its ideal subdivision into vertical and horizontal axes that serve to connect characters and narrative episodes, the article concludes on the importance of the occhiello as part of the set of engravings that illustrate the novel.

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

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...

The Rhetoric of Anachronism

This essay organizes its readings around a figure of speech, anachronism, that embodies a defining tension in much new formalist thought, one best expressed as a chiasmus: the historicity of form and the formal quality of history. I aim to trouble the lingering binary distinctions between text and context by analyzing the capacity of anachronistic discourse to collapse the boundaries between a literary work's internal means of reference and its external referential compass. Because the aesthetically productive temporal fissures that anachronism produces are not limited to any single literary genre, I examine the rhetoric of anachronism in two historical novels—Alessandro Manzoni's I promessi sposi (The Betrothed) and Giorgio Bassani's Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis)—two texts dealing with the Holocaust—Primo Levi's “Il tramonto di Fòssoli” (“Sunset at Fossoli”) and Robert Antelme's L'espèce humaine (The Human Race)—and poems by Francis Ponge. My argument centers on the ability of certain modes of temporal disjunction to subvert any a priori and potentially reductive belief in the objective historicity of an aesthetic form, especially when this same creative representation emerges as a challenge to a visceral historical crisis. Throughout the essay, I make claims on behalf of the “necessity” and “ethics” of the rhetoric of anachronism, primarily because it provides a corrective against any attempt to reduce the formal matter of literary discourse to the status of mere reflector or mirror of its contextual referents and, correspondingly, resists the isolation or separation of this same formal component from the historical discourses in which it not only participates but also, in some cases, actively shapes.

Tagli, innesti, margini e cicatrici: Il ritorno di Renzo

Renzo, the protagonist of Manzoni's "I promessi sposi", travels twice to Milan and back home. Both journeys are important, but it is the investigation of the second homecoming in particular that seems to provide us with a telling allegory of the "juice of the whole story" : by showing the imperfect circle described by the character's journeys, as well as his reflection on the problematic relationship between happiness and memory.

Alessandro Manzoni's "I promessi sposi": A Chaste Novel and an Erotic Palimpsest

In I promessi sposi, Manzoni avoids love scenes, fearing that some readers might relive them with excessive intensity. This article focuses on twentieth-century writers and critics who introduced erotic elements in their rewriting or rereading of the novel. Their eroticization of Manzoni was often prompted by satirical intentions or a taste for desecration. Yet writers such as Alberto Moravia and Mario Soldati and critics such as Vittorio Spinazzola and Paolo Valesio have glimpsed in the novel the erotic elements that Manzoni had tried to suppress, and used this perception to express the changed sensitivities of their own time.

Landscape and gender in Italian opera: the Alpine virgin from Bellini to Puccini

List of illustrations List of musical examples Acknowledgments 1. Virgins, mountains, opera 2. 'At the foot of the Alps': The landscape of La sonnambula 3. Linda di Chamounix and the ideology of chastity 4. The politics of genre in Luisa Miller 5. Deflowering the Alps: from I promessi sposi to La Wally and Fedora 6. La fanciulla del West: a new landscape for a new virgin Notes Index.

Records, Fiction, and Power in Alessandro Manzoni's I promessi sposi and Storia della colonna infame

The final edition of Manzoni's major works comprises a novel, I promessi sposi, and a historical investigation, Storia della colonna infame. In so doing, Manzoni behaves as an archivist who assembles a dossier of records. Narrating only events supported by, or consistent with archival records defines Manzoni's novel as an original type of historical narrative. As Manzoni unveils the archive's reliance on power he ends up, in Storia della colonna infame, by exposing the core of invention that lies at the foundation of the archive. He reaches a theoretical impasse that brings about his silence as creative writer after 1842.

Secrets and Puzzles: Silence and the Unsaid in Contemporary Italian Writing by Nicoletta Simborowski (review)

MLR, 100.3, 2005 843 Secrets and Puzzles: Silence and the Unsaid in Contemporary Italian Writing. By NicolettaSimborowski. Oxford: Legenda. 2003. x+177 pp. ?35- ISBN 1900755 -74-2. The power of suggesting more than what is said is not restricted to poetry alone, but is a characteristic of the best prose as well. A classic example of this technique in Italian literature is to be found in Manzoni's / promessi sposi, where the simple phrase at the end ofthe episode ofthe nun of Monza, 'la sventurata rispose', suggests infinitelymore to the imagination of the reader than do the several pages of scabrous details of the misdeeds of this nun in Fermo e Lucia, the earlier version of the novel. However, the notion ofthe unsaid, as much as itis fascinating, and indeed central in the discussion of literature, is elusive and open to interpretation; hence, it must be pinned down. This is what Nicoletta Simborowski does in the firstchapter of her thought provoking volume, where she provides the theoretical background for a discussion of the unsaid, summarizing the contributions of theorists including Ducrot, Derrida, Kermode, Bakhtin, Barthes, Blanchot, Lyotard, Bloom, and Collini. The importance of twentieth-century critical approaches is also underlined: these include feminist criticism, work in the fantastic, and psychoanalytical studies. The volume is divided into six chapters. After the introductory section mentioned above there are four chapters, each devoted to the analysis of a specific text by a well-known post-war Italian writer, respectively Primo Levi, Cesare Pavese, Natalia Ginzburg, and Francesca Sanvitale. The sixth and finalchapter is not concerned with the literary analysis of a text but examines more generally the phenomenon of the Einaudi publishing house, to which these authors are connected, 'in the context of post-war attitudes and tastes in literature' (p. 5). The choice of the period and ofthe authors is significant. Simborowski finds that, despite living in a period characterized by freedom of expression (following the era of Fascist censorship), these writers decided, at a certain point in their career, to censor their own work. She provides examples of omission or self-censorship, and elicits curiosity as to the reasons behind the censorship. The second chapter examines Levi's Se questo e un uomo according to a poetics of ritegno,or restraint. Through ritegno,which is seen here as 'both a stylistic technique and an emotional response' (p. 29), Levi does not burden his readers with oppressive details, but at the same time awakens in them an awareness of the enormity of what is not described. This element of reticence, motivated by respect for the reader, is seen by Simborowski as the key to Levi's success and to the approachability of his work on the Holocaust. The analysis is impeccable. Less convincing, however, and perhaps unfounded, is the discussion of Levi's alleged homophobia or unease with sexuality which, according to Simborowski, is expressed as distaste for Henri, one of the prisoners Levi meets in the concentration camp. This is an example of the arbitrariness to which the notion of the unsaid lends itself, and one wonders if the unsaid offers a useful means of investigation of the literary text when it is used as the basis of conjecture regarding the personality of the writer. The third chapter revolves around Pavese's novel La casa in collina and an earlier short story, 'La famiglia', which sketched the same theme and plot. Exclusions and elaborations in the novel, in comparison with the short story,highlight the protagonist's incapacity for commitment in both the private and the political spheres. This also permits an insightful analysis ofthe theme of 'youth', which in the novel stands for thoughtless, conscience-free violence and makes 'the novel a powerful condemnation of violence of any kind, including that perpetrated by the partisans' (p. 68). With these observations Simborowski sets out to reveal Pavese's concealed political agenda, which is that of justifying his choice of neutrality as well as encoding an apologia for the Fascist sympathies he entertained during the firstyears of the conflict. 844 Reviews The fourth chapter considers the family language implemented by Ginzburg in Lessico famigliare as a 'background music' which halts...

Una Tragica Parodia. Il Rifacimento Daveroniano de I Promessi Sposi di Alessandro Manzoni

The established critical view is that the wide popularity of Guido da Verona, the novelist who sold more copies of his books than any other in Italy during the early twentieth century, was fatally destroyed by his parody of Alessandro Manzoni's I promessi sposi, which was published in 1930. Da Verona's book was burned in public and then withdrawn. The writer became a victim of ferocious persecution by the Fascists. His previous novels also became unpopular and he died poor (perhaps suicidal) and forgotten in 1939. This study argues, on the basis of unpublished and unknown documents from da Verona's archive), that his parody of Manzoni's book was merely used as a pretext by the Fascist authorities for retaliation against a writer who was considered dangerous by the regime. Strangely enough, even though the regime saw his novels as spreading ideas which in no way fitted the Fascist mould that Mussolini wanted all Italians to embrace, the writer himself had for more than ten years been convinced that he was a good Fascist. His parody of Manzoni's masterpiece was actually well realized and relatively harmless and would have been unlikely to cause much reaction if da Verona had not been already seen as a menace to Fascism.

Letter on Romanticism

It was a foreign critic, ironically, who grasped the insurmountable national challenge that alessandro Manzoni posed to himself and to Italy's future authors with his monumental novel I promessi sposi (The Betrothed [1827, rev. ed. 1840]). Manzoni's basic theme, Georg Lukács writes, is “much less a given, concrete, historical crisis of national history” than it is “the tragedy of the Italian people as a whole” (70). This eternal plight—distilled into the story of the courtship and separation of two peasants in seventeenth-century Lombardy during plague, riots, and Spanish occupation—encompassed Italy's perpetual struggle against foreign rule, its lack of a unifying language and polity, and its reticent modernity, especially its tensions between religious tradition and secular progress. According to Lukács, the universality of the text combined with the abiding, unchanging nature of the problems it fictionalized essentially exhausted the genre of the historical novel that it introduced to Italy. Posterity has vindicated this assessment. Manzoni abandoned the genre soon after I promessi sposi to dedicate himself to historical writing proper, and his novel remains ensconced in the Italian public imaginary, just behind Dante's Commedia, as the towering, mythic work that helped occasion Italy's belated unification in 1861.

Manzoni and the Aesthetics of the Lombard Seicento: Art Assimilated into the Narrative of 'I promessi sposi'

Manzoni and the Aesthetics of the Lombard Seicento: Art Assimilated into the Narrative of 'I promessi sposi'