The Formation of a National Audience in Italy, 1750–1890

Readers and Spectators of Italian Culture

Edited by Gabriella Romani and Jennifer Burns - Contributions by Giacomo Mannironi; Roberto Risso; Giulia Brian; Martina Piperno; Fabio Camilletti; Federico Casari; Fabio Finotti; Paola Giuli; Adriana Chemello; Olivia Santovetti; Maria Grazia Lolla; Ombretta Frau; Cristina Gragnani and Katharine Mitchell

The late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries witness significant advancement in the production and, crucially, the consumption of culture in Italy. During the long process towards and beyond Italy becoming a nation-state in 1861, new modes of writing and performing – the novel, the self-help manual, theatrical improvisation – develop in response to new practices and technologies of production and distribution. Key to the emergence of an inclusive national audience in Italy is, however, the audience itself. A wide and varied body of consumers of culture, animated by the notion of an Italian national cultural identity, create in this period an increasingly complex demand for different cultural products. This body is energized by the wider access to education and to the Italian language brought about by educational reforms, by growing urbanization, by enhanced social mobility, and by transcultural connections across European borders.
This book investigates this process, analyzing the ways in which authors, composers, publishers, performers, journalists, and editors engage with the anxieties and aspirations of their diverse audiences. Fourteen essays by specialists in the field, exploring individual contexts and cases, demonstrate how interests related to gender, social class, cultural background and practices of reading and spectatorship, exert determining influence upon the production of culture in this period. They describe how women, men, and children from across the social and regional strata of the emerging nation contribute incrementally but actively to the idea and the growing reality of an Italian national cultural life. They show that from newspapers to salon performances, from letters to treatises in social science, from popular novels to literary criticism, from philosophical discussions to opera theaters, there is evidence in Italy in this period of unprecedented participation, crossing academic and popular cultures, in the formation of a national audience in Italy. This cultural transformation later produces the mass culture in Italy which underpins the major movements of the twentieth century and which undergoes new challenges and reformulations in the Italy we know today.

University Press Copublishing Division / Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

Pages: 308 • Trim: 6⅜ x 9¼

978-1-61147-800-6 • Hardback • June 2017 • $143.00 • (£110.00)

978-1-61147-801-3 • eBook • June 2017 • $135.50 • (£105.00)

Series: The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Series in Italian Studies

Subjects: Literary Criticism / European / Italian, History / Europe / Italy, History / Modern / 19th Century

The Formation of a National Audience in Italy, 1750–1890

Readers and Spectators of Italian Culture

Hardback

eBook

Summary

The late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries witness significant advancement in the production and, crucially, the consumption of culture in Italy. During the long process towards and beyond Italy becoming a nation-state in 1861, new modes of writing and performing – the novel, the self-help manual, theatrical improvisation – develop in response to new practices and technologies of production and distribution. Key to the emergence of an inclusive national audience in Italy is, however, the audience itself. A wide and varied body of consumers of culture, animated by the notion of an Italian national cultural identity, create in this period an increasingly complex demand for different cultural products. This body is energized by the wider access to education and to the Italian language brought about by educational reforms, by growing urbanization, by enhanced social mobility, and by transcultural connections across European borders.
This book investigates this process, analyzing the ways in which authors, composers, publishers, performers, journalists, and editors engage with the anxieties and aspirations of their diverse audiences. Fourteen essays by specialists in the field, exploring individual contexts and cases, demonstrate how interests related to gender, social class, cultural background and practices of reading and spectatorship, exert determining influence upon the production of culture in this period. They describe how women, men, and children from across the social and regional strata of the emerging nation contribute incrementally but actively to the idea and the growing reality of an Italian national cultural life. They show that from newspapers to salon performances, from letters to treatises in social science, from popular novels to literary criticism, from philosophical discussions to opera theaters, there is evidence in Italy in this period of unprecedented participation, crossing academic and popular cultures, in the formation of a national audience in Italy. This cultural transformation later produces the mass culture in Italy which underpins the major movements of the twentieth century and which undergoes new challenges and reformulations in the Italy we know today.

Details

University Press Copublishing Division / Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

Pages: 308 • Trim: 6⅜ x 9¼

978-1-61147-800-6 • Hardback • June 2017 • $143.00 • (£110.00)

978-1-61147-801-3 • eBook • June 2017 • $135.50 • (£105.00)

Series: The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Series in Italian Studies

Subjects: Literary Criticism / European / Italian, History / Europe / Italy, History / Modern / 19th Century

Author

Gabriella Romani is associate professor of Italian at Seton Hall University

Jennifer Burns is associate professor of Italian at University of Warwick

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction by Jennifer Burns and Gabriella Romani.
Readership and Consumerism
1. Giacomo Mannironi, The Economics of Reading: Cultural Consumption of Novels and letteratura amena in Eighteenth-Century Venice.
2. Roberto Risso, “The Virtue of Wanting.” Galatei and Readers in Nineteenth-Century Italy: Training the Citizen and Educating the Public between Bourgeois Values and the Risorgimento.
3. Gabriella Romani, National Readership and Cultural Consumerism in Late Nineteenth-Century Italy: Edmondo De Amicis and the Sentimental Appeal of his Fiction.
4. Giulia Brian, A “Question of Rule of Thumb!” Antonio Fogazzaro between Publishers and Readers.
Authorship, Readership and the Press
1. Martina Piperno, Constructing the Myth of Vico between Press and Literature (1802-1846).
2. Fabio Camilletti, Towards an Archaeology of Italian Modernity. Re-thinking the Classicist/Romantic Quarrel.
3. Federico Casari, Defining Young Audiences in Post-Unification Italy: Participation and Interaction in the Political and Literary Press.
4. Fabio Finotti, A Force Field: Literature, Journalism and the Market at the End of the Nineteenth Century.
Gendered Readership and Spectatorship
1. Paola Giuli, From Academy to Stage: Improvisation, Gender and National Character.
2. Adriana Chemello, The Revolution in Reading: From Manzoni’s “twenty-five readers” to the “twenty-five thousand female readers” of romanzi d’appendici.
3. Olivia Santovetti, Reading as “evasione militante”: Fosca (1869) by Iginio Ugo Tarchetti.
4. Maria Grazia Lolla, Bovarysm in a New Key: The Reader of Novels and the Social Sciences in fin-de-siècle Italy.
5. Ombretta Frau and Cristina Gragnani, La Piccola Posta: Twitter for the Nineteenth-Century-Woman?
6. Katharine Mitchell, Evenings Out: Female Spectators of Opera and Theatre in Late Nineteenth-Century Italy.
About the Contributors
Index