Promessi Sposi Research Articles

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

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

‘Teco io sto’: Strategies of seduction in Act II of Un ballo in maschera

‘La sventurata rispose’ [the poor wretch answered]. This sentence, among the most famous of Italian literature, appears in chapter 10 of Alessandro Manzoni's I promessi sposi (The Betrothed, first published in 1827 and revised in 1840), where it functions as stitches trying to heal the deep wound caused by a radical surgical intervention, the excision of pages and pages devoted to a description of seduction. In the best Gothic tradition, the first version of the novel, entitled Fermo e Lucia (1821–23), contained a long account of the seduction of the Nun of Monza by a young libertine, but religious and, apparently, aesthetic considerations convinced Manzoni to cut this episode and replace it with those three words. The rhetorical figure of reticence, so prominent in chapter 10 of I promessi sposi, dominates the tradition of Italian ‘high’ Classicist and Romantic literature, which seems to have considered seduction unfit as a literary theme, to be left to the gutter of the popular novel.

History or pre-history? Recent revisions in the eighteenth-century novel in Italy

The rise of the modern Italian novel is traditionally associated with the publication of Alessandro Manzoni's / Promessi sposi (The Betrothed) between 1825 and 1827, but recent critical attention has turned to the presence of the indigenous novel in eighteenth-century Venice. A short-lived phenomenon, alongside theatre it dominated Venetian cultural life between 1750 and 1780 and it is associated with two former playwrights, Pietro Chiari and Antonio Piazza, turned novelists. While at one level the eighteenth-century novel owes its rediscovery to a new interest in readerships and reading practices, at another it is the outcome of a wish to free the birth of the novel of associations with nation-building and nationhood.

Book Review: Manzoni and the Aesthetics of the Lombard Seicento. Art Assimilated into the Narrative of “I promessi sposi

Book Review: Manzoni and the Aesthetics of the Lombard Seicento. Art Assimilated into the Narrative of “I promessi sposi

Fear of the Mother's Tongue: Secrecy and Gossip in Manzoni's I Promessi Sposi

Fear of the Mother's Tongue: Secrecy and Gossip in Manzoni's I Promessi Sposi

Counter‐reformation and popular culture inI promessi sposi: A case of historical censorship

Counter‐reformation and popular culture inI promessi sposi: A case of historical censorship

“He was Tall, Dark and Bald”: Aristocratic Desire and Fantasies of Authority in I Promessi Sposi

“He was Tall, Dark and Bald”: Aristocratic Desire and Fantasies of Authority in <i>I Promessi Sposi</i>

When the killing had to stop: Manzoni's paradigm of Christian conversion

The Paradigm It is traditional to talk of the systematic change in Manzoni's outlook, thinking and belief which took place around 1810 as his conversion or reconversion to Christianity. The term 'conversion' is doubly relevant to this paper. Not only will its subject be Manzoni's variant representations of religious conversion (achieved or missed) within his creative works of the period from his own conversion to the first publication of I promessi sposi in 1827. These works are themselves 'conversions' in the more special sense of 're-writings'. We have the Inni sacri, sacred poems, in which the gospel narrative is used as a base and a model for the conjunction of divine history and human history: one tenable definition of the Inni sacri is therefore that they are a re-writing and a contemplation of sacred history as also empirical history. The two tragedies and the novel, conversely, give us the conversion of profane history into sacred history and can be defined as Christian mimeses (representations) of secular histories. If all writing can be seen as rewriting and all discourse as differance, here in Manzoni's works of 1810 to 1827 we have a very specific version of the discursive transaction, a very specific kind of 'conversion'.! This paper will focus on the latter group of works, Manzoni's 're-writing' of secular histories as Christian histories. The poem on the death of Napoleon, II cinque maggio, will also be examined under this rubric. This re-writing involves the avowedly fictive or imaginative element which to Manzoni's evident discomfort characterizes his two tragedies

‘QUESTO MATRIMONIO NON S'HA DA FARE’

The opening of Manzoni's I promessi sposi is substantially the same in all three versions of the novel, the 1821–23 draft known by the title Fermo e Lucia, the 1827 edition with the definitive title, commonly called ‘la ventisettana’ by the critics, and the final 1840–42 version. One fine evening in early November 1628 Don Abbondio, the parish priest of a village on Lake Como, is waylaid by two bravi, a word which Manzoni used, possibly inaccurately, to identify thugs, hit-men and bodyguards in the service of wealthy and powerful noblemen. Don Abbondio was due to marry the following day two young people from the village, Renzo Tramaglino and Lucia Mondella, but he is told in no uncertain terms that ‘Questo matrimonio non s'ha da fare, né domani né mai’. Behind this prohibition lies the fact that Don Rodrigo, the local potentate, has made a bet with his cousin Conte Attilio. What the wager exactly consists in is not known, but the circumstantial evidence points to a boast on Don Rodrigo's part that, no later than St Martin's day (II November), he will seduce Lucia, whom he has made the object of his desires and of what today would be defined as sexual harassment at her workplace. The motivations of what Renzo surmises is a ‘brutale’ and ‘infame’ passion are not clear, since Lucia is a girl of ‘modesta bellezza’. The very first draft describes her as having ‘due occhi neri e vivi, e modesti, e un volto di una regolare e non comune bellezza’, where ‘non comune’ should be interpreted not as ‘rare’ or ‘unusual’ but as ‘not ordinary or vulgar’. In other words, without being exceptionally beautiful Lucia was more attractive than ordinary girls; but the rest of the novel makes it plain that Lucia's appeal was mostly due to the outward reflection of her inner virtues, and not to the beauties that usually inflame the infamous passions of wealthy playboys.

The Uses and the Ends of Discourse in I Promessi Sposi: Manzoni's Narrator, His Characters, and Their Author

Questions of language, particularly of its worldly use and abuse, are of major concern in I Promessi Sposi.1 These questions begin with the book's introduction and continue, though in constantly varying forms and contexts, throughout the novel. In the introduction the narrator states his reasons for reworking the story, which he claims to have found in an anonymous seventeenth-century manuscript, and begins to explain the procedures he has adopted for revising its language. Although toward the end of the introduction the narrator makes an oblique reference to himself as an author, the guise he assumes actually combines the attributes of two traditional roles, that of the dutiful editor, common to eighteenth-century fiction from Defoe, Richardson, and Laclos to Goethe and Foscolo, and that of the historical novel's more actively creative writer, such as found in the contemporary and highly influential books of Sir Walter Scott. The introduction opens, of course, with a passage supposedly copied verbatim from the scratched and faded original, which the

The Moral Formation of Characters in I PROMESSI SPOSI

The Moral Formation of Characters in <i>I PROMESSI SPOSI</i>

Multiple Perspective in I PROMESSI SPOSI: The Uprisings in Milano

Multiple Perspective in <i>I PROMESSI SPOSI</i>: The Uprisings in Milano

The conversion of Manzoni's l'Innominato or, The Repressed Catholic Consciousness of a Criminal

THE CONVERSION OF MANZONFS L INNOMINATO OR, THE REPRESSED CATHOLIC CONSCIOUSNESS OF A CRIMINAL ANNETTE LEDDY In the portrayal ofl' Innominato 's religious conversion, conflict we see the dis- which runs throughout Promessi Sposi between two historical novel. tinctly different narrators. One narrator extends the lens of psycho- logical realism, the subjective dimension of the The other narrator is Catholic, and seeks to prove the intrinsically Catholic is nature of fact that human we psychology.^ This problem comphcated by the are the products of are presented with characters who Catholic upbringings within a Cathohc culture and who therefore, whether or not they bave rejected Catholicism, would realistically possess a Catholic psychology. Thus, while the psychological-realist narrator often successfully captures the experience of Catholic anxiety, the Catholic narrator often makes this anxiety less credible, interesting and profound by his habit of informing us of when a character's are those of a anxieties are those of a good Catholic and when they bad Catholic. The Catholic narrator often seems to intervene in the he can give that character's crisis a Catholic name. It is almost as though the Catholic narrator is resisting the dis- analysis of a character so covery of the universal; that is, the potentially non-Catholic nature of

Plot-time and Rhythm in Manzoni's I Promessi Sposi

Plot-time and Rhythm in Manzoni's I Promessi Sposi

Error and the Abuse of Language in the "Promessi Sposi"

Error and the Abuse of Language in the "Promessi Sposi"

The Seicento as Strategy: "Providence" and the "Bourgeois" in I Promessi Sposi

The Seicento as Strategy: "Providence" and the "Bourgeois" in I Promessi Sposi

Stylistic and Structural Duality in Manzoni's I Promessi Sposi

Stylistic and Structural Duality in Manzoni's I Promessi Sposi

Reviews

Book reviewed in this article:Tobin, Ronald W. Racine and Seneca.Lagarde, André, et Laurent Michard, avec la collaboration de Jacques Monférier. Les Grandes Auteurs français. Textes et littérature du moyen âge au XXe siècle.Roeming, Robert F. (editor). Developing Awareness Through Poetry.Saitz, Robert L., and Donna Carr. Selected Readings in English: For Students of English as a Second Language.Mazzamuto, P. (editor). Alessandro Manzoni's “I promessi sposi.”Chomsky, Carol. The Acquisition of Syntax in Children from 5 to 10.Shepherd, Walter (compiler). Shepherd's Glossary of Graphic Signs and Symbols.Matejka, Ladislav, and Krystyna Pomorska (editors). Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views.Haro, Robert P. Latin Americana Research in the United States and Canada: A Guide and Directory.Borges, Jorge Luis. Doctor Brodie's Report. Translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni.Carballido, Emilio. Medusa. Edited by Jeanine Gaucher‐Shultz and Alfredo Morales.Moon, Harold K. Spanish Literature: A Critical Approach.Gicovate, Bernard. San Juan de la Cruz.Díaz, Janet W. Ana María Matute.Dowling, John. Leandro Fernández de Moratín.Shaw, Donald. A Literary History of Spain. The Nineteenth Century.Bowen, J. Donald, and Robert P. Stockwell. Patterns of Spanish Pronunciation, A Drill‐book.Deyermond, A. D. A Literary History of Spain. The Middle Ages. Edited by R. O. Jones.Kurz, Paul Konrad, S.J. On Modern German Literature. Volume II. Translated by Sister Mary Frances McCarthy.Ulmer, Bernhard. Martin Opitz.Grebe, Paul, Rudolf Köster, and Wolfgang Müller (editors). Bedeutungswörterbuch.Zohn, Harry. Karl Kraus.Stern, Guy. War, Weimar, and Literature: The Story of the Neue Merkur, 1914–1925.Boesch, Bruno (editor). German Literature. A Critical Survey. Translated by Ronald Taylor.Stern, Guy, Gottfried Merkel, and Jerry Glenn (editors). Lessing Yearbook II.Stern, Guy, Gottfried Merkel, and Jerry Glenn (editors). Lessing Yearbook III.Fenger, Henning. The Heibergs. Twayne's World Authors Series. Translated and edited by Frederick J. Marker.Plato. Timaeus and Critias. Penguin Classics. Translated with an introduction and an appendix on Atlantis by H. D. P. Lee.Cooper, Lee. The Chinese Language for Beginners.

British and American Translations of I Promessi Sposi

British and American Translations of I Promessi Sposi

The antidote to the fear. The rhetorical genres as a link between literature and society. Examples from Italian literature

After a brief historical-methodological overview, this study is meant to prove that the theory of rhetorical genres (deliberative, judicial and epideictic), connected to that of the literary genres, offers scholars more insightful critical opportunities. The nouvelle rhétorique, applied to the analysis of rhetorical and literary genres, permits to unveil the argumentative dimension in literature. We have evaluated some passages of the Decameron and I promessi sposi [The Betrothed], two of the great classics of Italian literature, differing by historical settings, genres and contents. The two books have been analyzed from the rhetorical perspective. I promessi sposi [The Betrothed] may be interpreted as an instance of judicial genre, while the Decameron as deliberative and epideictic genres.