Peter Hainsworth

Along with Dagny a.k.a Madame Vauquer from the Vauquer Boarding House and Jonathan from Intermittencies of the Mind I am reading The Leopard (1958) by Sicilian author Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, so I thought I’d take a look at another VSI. But it’s not really surprising that Italian Literature, a Very Short Introduction doesn’t mention Lampedusa because he was so very much out of step with postwar developments in Italy. In the wake of fascism, Italian literature was generally brutally realist, while Lampedusa’s book is a nostalgic novel set in pre-unification Italy. It doesn’t fit into the characteristics of Italian literature in this period at all.

This VSI is not like the mostly chronological structure of the French VSI which I read a little while ago. After a useful four-page introduction, the book is framed as general discussions of problematic trends and issues:
•History
•Tradition
•Theory
•Politics
•Secularism
•Women

(Women get a chapter all of their own because (Ferrante Fever aside) they have been almost invisible in Italian literature.)

As you might expect from the country that brought us Dante and Petrarch, there is a lot about poetry in this VSI, and interesting as it was, (and will be again when I get round to reading The Divine Comedy) it was less useful for my purposes than the French VSI. This is because there isn’t really much in the way of an Italian 19th century novel, which is where my interest in literature began as a teenager. Nothing like an Austen, or a Dickens, or a Zola. The great 19th century Italian novel is The Betrothed (I Promessi Sposi) (1840) by Alessandro Manzoni and it’s notable as a milestone in the development of the modern, unified Italian language, but it sounds rather dull and didactic to me.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/01/11/italian-literature-a-very-short-introduction...… (mere)