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

Abstract

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.