Late Nineteenth Century Italian narrative

My research aims at investigating the function of ghostly entities in the field of Italian popular literature between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, by considering the fiction of Carolina Invernizio (1851–1916) and Matilde Serao (1856–1927), two leading authors of the Italian feuilleton, which was directed at petty-bourgeois and proletarian readers. Invernizio wrote some successful novels focused on the “buried alive” woman, whose apparitions are dreadful and uncanny but, at the same time, lead the “living” people to right the wrong, to punish acts of violence, to resolve the faulty lines in society which were provoked by the patriarchal system’s excesses or by human evil.
This paper examines Invernizio’s La sepolta viva (“The Woman buried Alive”, 1896), which shows an innovative portrayal of a woman aspiring
to a greater role by escaping from gender subjugation. This novel, a
bestseller of a prolific writer who published more than 120 novels in forty
years, was strongly appreciated in Italy and was repeatedly reprinted and
translated into English and Spanish. Matilde Serao, a long-established
investigative journalist, was the first woman to edit an Italian journal and to author important works within the Verista movement, including Il ventre di Napoli (The Belly of Naples, 1884) and Il paese di cuccagna (The Land of Cockayne,1891). Serao highlighted the hermeneutical role of the fantastic, which reveals a hidden and obscure reality, allowing people to grasp the deep, unconscious reasons for their actions. In “Barchetta fantasma”, (Little ghostly Boat”) and “Leggenda di Capodimonte” (“The Legend of Capodimonte”), in the collection Leggende Napoletane (Neapolitan Legends, 1881), ghosts sanction deviant forms of passion. In ““O Munaciello” (“The Little Monk”), also in Leggende napoletane, Serao shows the human side of her literary fantastic by depicting a deformed child, the scapegoat for the community, who returns to the world after death, and embodies both a sad, irrepressible need for love and a willingness to avenge injustice. In “La donna dall’abito nero e dal ramo di corallo rosso” (“The Woman with the Black Dress and the Red Coral Brooch”) (1883), the ghost personifies the “Jungian shadow”, the rejected side of the self. Ghosts in Invernizio and Serao’s works represent a means of defending reasons based on instincts and passions while proposing a more active role for women, giving literary and human dignity to the “difference”.

Scipio Sighele, _The Criminal Crowd And Other Writings on Mass Society_
Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by Nicoletta Pireddu
Translated by Nicoletta Pireddu and Andrew Robbins
Foreword by Tom Huhn

The so-called “age of crowds” still evokes primarily the late nineteenth-century French context, with the fearful popular uprising leading to the Paris Commune, the numerous disturbing images of masses in novels by Balzac, Sue, Maupassant, Zola, Huysmans, and Adam among others, and Gustave Le Bon’s renowned volume The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895).
Yet, four years before Le Bon, Italian jurist, sociologist, cultural and literary critic Scipio Sighele (1868-1913) had published La folla delinquente. Saggio di psicologia collettiva [The Criminal Crowd. An Essay on Collective Psychology], to be followed by other pioneering explorations of group behavior and of the power of suggestion upon collective crime.
This volume offers the first English translation of Sighele’s seminal book and of excerpts from his subsequent works in the domains of sociology, psychology, law, politics, and literary criticism: La coppia criminale [The Criminal Couple], La delinquenza settaria [Sectarian Delinquency]; L’intelligenza della folla [The Intelligence of the Crowd]; La donna nova [The New Woman]; Eva moderna [Modern Eve]; Letteratura tragica [Tragic Literature]; Nell’arte e nella scienza [In Art and in Science]. An extensive introduction by Nicoletta Pireddu contextualizes Sighele’s overall contribution as a public intellectual negotiating between tradition and modernity in the European fin de siècle, able to grasp both the destructive and the constructive power of masses.
This collection draws the multifaceted portrait of a provocative and problematic thinker who, by participating in crucial international debates, brings to post-unification Italy a new outlook on paramount issues like the role of urbanization in the development of criminality, the unstable borders between individual and collective accountability in mass society, the legal and ideological constraints in the education and emancipation of women, the social and institutional challenges to the care and upbringing of children, and the responsibility of literary representation in the relationship between aesthetic standards and ethical norms.

""Un testo come Il buco nel muro, scritto da un patriota e uomo politico, già autore di romanzi storici di successo, nell’Italia risorgimentale da poco unita non poteva essere oggetto al quale prestare seria attenzione. Inspiegabilmente ironico, inaspettatamente stratificato di citazioni e allusioni di vario tono, Il buco nel muro si presentava come un incrocio tra feuilleton e metanarrazione ammiccante. Al tempo stesso sembrava una storia di facile e impossibile lettura.
Un testo considerato ‘popolare’ svela oggi, a oltre cento anni dalla pubblicazione, una varietà di registri e modelli che, innestandosi sulla tradizione sterniana e contaminandola di tratti nazionali, risulta singolare nel panorama romanzesco italiano del tempo. Lo sperimentalismo formale e linguistico, però, aspetta ancora indagini critiche appropriate e pone nuovamente il problema di quale fosse, davvero, la poetica del Guerrazzi politico ma letterato. La nuova edizione del testo, corredata di un saggio introduttivo, un accurato commento e un ricco apparato di note, ne illumina la pluralità di riferimenti.""

D’Annunzio’ s approach to beauty has largely unnoticed connections with the anti-modern anthropological discourse on symbolic economy that at the turn of the century begins to reject instrumentality in life and representation. From the cultural primitivism of his time, D’Annunzio develops a consistent reflection on the aesthetic and ethical significance of ritual exchange that informs his search for a higher morality through art.
Focusing on the nexus of art, giving and temporality, this essay addresses the intuitions and the contradictions of unconditional expenditure in D’Annunzio’s works, analyzing the leitmotif of the hand as an ambivalent carrier of lavishness and power. From Trionfo della morte to Il Fuoco, from Le vergini delle rocce to his autobiographical writings, the implications of D’Annunzio’s argument contribute to an extended theoretical debate that interrogates the role of value in aesthetic and social practices—from Nietzsche, Mauss, and Bataille to Heidegger and Derrida. Can art’s luxurious dissipation truly break the circle of speculation and restitution?

Guerrazzi’s fiction was as important as almost totally removed from Italian Risorgimento unconscious, even if his novels – La battaglia di Benevento and L’assedio di Firenze, in particular – were strongly involved in the construction of the idea of Italian national unity and in the nationalistic action itself.  Public readings of his novels were organized with mass participation and strong adhesion seldom to be seen in the Italian literary history. What was the cause of this tremendous success? If a nation is a ‘discourse’, which kind of discourse were involved in Guerrazzi’s novels and conveyed by them? And why have these narrations that so much influenced the ideology of the unity of the nation been so easily and quickly forgotten? These paper focuses on these aspects, with particular attention to the development of narrative after the national unity, and to how after 1861 the imagine of national community changed these ‘mythologies’.