Italian neo-realism, though notoriously difficult to define, does present a recognisable set of features of which any individual work may provide its own sub-set. It was part of the atmosphere of the time, rather than a school or a programme. Calvino, in his well-known preface to the 1964 edition of his novel Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (‘The Path to the Nests of Spiders’), stressed the compulsive storytelling of the Resistance and the uncoordinated, unprofessional spontaneity of the new writers who emerged from the war-time experience. Most outstanding ‘neo-realist’ works in fact present non-neo-realist features, while works which were not realist at all in technique, such as the highly experimental novels of Vittorini, appeared deceptively at home within the cultural ambience of neo-realism thanks to their contemporary relevance.

All neo-realist works directly engage with history, with the present moment seen as one in which individuals participate in collective destinies. The experience by many of Resistance, civil war or internment explains both the sense of individual responsibility in the making of history and the countervailing sense of the individual's impotence in the grand historical process, the sheer struggle to survive amid the cataclysm. This often problematical public engagement impelled writers to escape from the ivory tower of self-centred or aesthetic contemplation in which they had sought refuge from the impositions of Fascism, and tempted them in the direction of popular epic. Typically, these works take the form of memoirs or more or less fictionalised documentaries or chronicles of the recent past, from the rise of Fascism in the early 1920s to the Resistance and right up to the present.

Introduction

What marks out the German literature of the period 1100 to 1450 is the emergence and establishment of an autonomous German literary culture in written form, such as had not existed in the previous period. From the late eleventh century onwards it is possible to see a realignment of the relationship between German writings and Latin writings, and between written literature in the vernacular and oral tradition.

Let us take just one area as an example. The new German vernacular biblical epic in couplet verse begins in the second half of the eleventh century with the Altdeutsche Genesis (also known as the Vienna Genesis, most likely c. 1060–1100), continues in the twelfth century with the Altdeutsche Exodus (probably c. 1100–30), the biblical poems of Frau Ava (probably d. 1127), the Vorauer Bucher Mosis (The Vorau Books of Moses, probably c. 1130–40), the Anegenge (The beginning, probably 1170–80) and the Kindheit Jesu (The childhood of Christ) by Konrad von Fuβesbrunnen (probably c. 1190–1200). These major narrative texts in Middle High German provide a literary context for the Mittelfrankische Reimbibel (The Central Franconian rhymed Bible), an extensive compendium of Old and New Testament matter including stories of the martyrs and early Christian history in German verse (early twelfth-century, only fragments survive); for the Annolied (The song of Anno, c. 1077–81), where for the first time historiographical matters are addressed in German verse; and for the first European vernacular chronicle in verse, the mid-twelfth-century Kaiserchronik (The chronicle of the emperors). We know of no directly comparable traditions of written narrative literature in German before this period - notwithstanding Otfrid and the shorter Old High German poems.

The literary culture of the Trecento

The glittering light of the tre corone has traditionally left the rest of Trecento literature in its shadow. Few of the scholars who have pored so minutely over the voluminous texts of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio have spared more than a glance for the work of the canonical threesome’s contemporaries. Even Natalino Sapegno’s magisterial Storia letteraria del Trecento – still the best short introduction, though sadly never translated into English – is typical in devoting barely sixty (of over four hundred) pages to ‘la letteratura dei minori’. Minor the other writers of the Trecento may be in comparison with the three great Florentines – most writers are – but, for all that, their work offers a richly varied range of literary responses to a historical and cultural situation, that of the Italian peninsula between about 1300 and about 1400, which is itself of unusual interest.

The approach to Italian literature in terms of the relationship between history and geography, pioneered by Carlo Dionisotti, is especially valuable for students of the fourteenth century. In this period none of the convenient shorthand of literary and cultural history – ‘Italy’, ‘Italian’, ‘author’, ‘text’, even ‘literature’ – has enough validity to pass unchallenged. The Italian peninsula in the Trecento, as Dante, Petrarch, and others lamented, enjoyed neither political nor linguistic unity; instead, many relatively small and congenitally hostile administrative units, practising disparate political systems and speaking numerous related but often mutually incomprehensible languages, occupied the region that, centuries later and through processes unthinkable to late medieval intellectuals, was to become the united nation with its standardised national language that we know today.

The full range of theatrical activity in Italy in the sixteenth century was wider, perhaps, than academic scholars are yet in a position to recognise. Popular theatre, particularly in rural areas, was resistant but undocumented. It has been revived in municipal drama festivals such as the Montepulciano Bruscelli, where the dramaturgy in its modern version contains features of plot and structure which seem fossilised from the first decades of the Cinquecento, before any humanist input. The development of religious theatre, from the starting point of Quattrocento Sacre rappresentazioni (see above, p. 175), is also a separate story from the one we shall tell here. Inevitably conservative in some respects, it emerged in the seventeenth century having absorbed a number of ‘classical’ features from the more secular genres.

In a single chapter on theatre in the Cinquecento, it is inevitable that we should concentrate on the lasting revolution which took place in dramaturgy and in the very concept of theatre. This was effected by the deliberate resurrection of modes and assumptions of ancient drama – as these were interpreted by Renaissance scholars, and as they were bent to the needs of Renaissance society. The snowballing effect of these changes on all European theatre is generally recognised. By around 1660, in England, France, Spain and northern Europe, the dominance of ‘classical’ models in drama was unmistakable; and like other aspects of Renaissance culture it was a trend which had begun in Italy.

‘Classicism’ and “anti-classicism’

The battle between the Tassisti and the Ariostisti over the epic does not have an obvious parallel in the case of lyric poetry, a genre about which the surviving fragment of Aristotle's Poetics is silent. ‘Classicists’ and ‘anti-classicists’ did on occasion exchange blows, but their opposition to one another should not obscure the fact that both – with the possible exception, among the latter, of iconoclast Pietro Aretino – are united in their devotion to antique precedent. Moreover, in spite of increasing literary specialisation, genres were still not airtight exclusive compartments; there was some give and take. We shall not be surprised to find poets who were predominantly ‘classicists’ engaging in ‘anti-classicist’ activities, or vice versa.

It is also remarkable, given the variously erotic subject-matter, how many of the poets we shall encounter, in both camps, were ecclesiastics. At first sight, to some modern eyes, an operation like that of Gerolamo Malipiero (1470s–1547), who in his popular Petrarca spirituale (1536) rewrote Petrarch's poems, systematically expunging any reference to profane love, might seem more comprehensible than the versified love pangs (heterosexual and homosexual) of canons, bishops and cardinals. We should remember, however, that the paradigmatic love celebrated by the Petrarchan classicists is upliftingly spiritual and Platonic, while the macrotext of the Canzoniere was read as the diary of a conscience torn between this world and the next, a conflict ultimately resolved in a renunciatory ascetic penitential direction.

The forms of literary prose

The expansion of the vernacular

In Cinquecento Italy the vernacular finally asserted itself alongside Latin as a widely used medium for literary prose. Confidence in the vernacular grew as it was cultivated by leading literary figures. Its use was further encouraged by the increase in the number and output of printing presses: this development made more easily accessible the texts which were regarded as models of good usage, and it provided new opportunities for writers of widely differing social and geographical origins to gain fame and fortune from work aimed at readership more varied than that of the age of manuscripts. Vernacular prose was used for all types of subject matter – from fictional narrative to the study of politics, history, social and personal relationships, art, and the vernacular language itself – and for an increasing number of translations from Greek and Latin. As these new horizons were opened up, prose style became more varied. Some writers were indebted to the model of Trecento Tuscan prose; others developed a more agile, informal manner which set out at times to capture the flavour of speech. Prose writing was, however, still by tradition principally the preserve of men, in contrast to lyric poetry, in which women were increasingly finding a voice.

The flourishing of prose was accompanied by a process of standardisation of the literary language during the first half of the century. Around 1500 almost all authors from outside Tuscany were using a type of vernacular which varied to some extent from region to region, indeed from author to author. They owed much to the stable model of the great Trecento Tuscan writers, particularly Boccaccio, but they introduced elements of Latin spelling, syntax and lexis in order to lend greater dignity to the younger language. They were also influenced by the usage of their own region, especially when this usage coincided with Latin spelling.

‘Mad and desperate study’

One of the would-be participants in the debate around Mme de Staël's views was Giacomo Leopardi, who in 1815 was a sickly seventeen-year-old from Recanati, a small hill town in the papal province of Marche. Deemed unsuitable for a sanctuary by the angels who had winged the house of the Virgin Mary all the way from Nazareth to its territory (they moved it after only one year to its final resting place at nearby Loreto), Recanati nevertheless ended up with something at least as important. It was a library of over 15,000 books collected in an informed and systematic way by Count Monaldo Leopardi (1776–1845), taking advantage of the sale of books from the religious houses abolished during French rule. Monaldo was one of those conservatives who believed the world was being swamped by a tide of pernicious liberalism, and was therefore prepared to swim against the tide, even when that meant falling foul of established authority. He was passionately committed to education. He opened his library to his fellow citizens (who seem to have ignored the opportunity) and obtained for his first-born, Giacomo, a dispensation to read banned books when the boy was only fifteen. Giacomo was often openly bitter in his letters about his father's narrow-minded and rigid attitude and beliefs, and grew up to dislike nearly everything he stood for; yet he knew he was sincere, had for him a trust and affection as deep and lasting as the ideological chasm that divided them, and, within Monaldo's limitations, received from him unfailing support.

The turn of the twentieth century in Italy was a time of great upheaval. Modernisation and expanding industry, while producing unprecedented prosperity, had disrupted the existing political and social institutions and alienated the popular masses. The modern, industrial society formed by economic liberalism was blamed for leading the country to the brink of collapse. Thanks to the parliamentary system, a once ‘well-knit’ and ‘vital’ human community had been replaced by the self-interest of political parties; the ‘people’ – the grandiose concept that galvanised the forces of Italian national unity – had been degraded, thanks to socialism, into the reality of ‘social classes’; an organic world, supported by tradition and moral values, had been turned into one dominated by political economy and materialism. The ways of reacting to this imaginary state of affairs combined age-old conservatism with vitalism and mysticism, and relied on myth and intuition as an antidote to positive knowledge. Philosophical vitalism at the turn of the century held that there existed in all living things a ‘primary finality’ or ‘vital flux’ which could not be reduced, as Darwinian science maintained, to environmental variables. The vitalistic philosophy which influenced Italian thought most in this period was that of Henri Bergson (1859–1941), who emphasised the cognitive power of intuition: its capacity to penetrate to the heart of objects and reveal what is unique and rationally inexpressible in them.

Although positivism was in itself believed to be a-political, its appeal to ‘scientific’ facts and its rejection of all spiritual and metaphysical doctrines, as well as its interest in the then developing social sciences, made it a strong ally of the socialist movement, whose appeal in this period had grown considerably, to the extent that in some quarters positivism was identified with socialism.

The literary map of Quattrocento Italy is one of geographical centres, and within these, of various kinds of structured social groups in the form of organisations: either religious (the Church or a religious order), educational (university, school, academy) or political, especially the court. In all cases, patronage was a determining factor for the author, for the kind of work written, the language it is written in, the arguments put forward, and the intended public. Even then, authors also depended on teachers, friends, professional colleagues, scribes (Pico della Mirandola dictated so fast that he needed two at a time!), librarians and booksellers. After the invention of printing, they needed in addition publishers and further patrons to cover printing expenses, and yet more friends in high places to write letters (often printed with the book) persuading the readers that they would not be dissatisfied after parting with a considerable amount of money. The courts were the obvious centres, with their traditions of patronage - not always happy - attracting large numbers - not always talented - of cultural and social climbers. Naples and Ferrara became flourishing centres of literary activity in the Quattrocento, each in very different ways. The diversification of activity needed to sustain a wide range of literary activity and printed book production favoured urban centres with a strong economy or guaranteed income. Florence and Venice fit the former requisite, and Rome the latter. This chapter will look at the ways in which different geographical centres in Italy produced the kinds of literature they did, whether Latin or vernacular, and try to identify the features particular to each centre.

Introduction

These years, which begin with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s maturity and end approximately at his death in 1832, used to be called the Age of Goethe. There were good reasons for this: the period contains most of Goethe’s major works, all of which display his characteristic tendency to embody the conflicts of the age refracted through his own, subjective experience and so claim representative status. Of course, this involved accepting Goethe’s absolute pre–eminence and taking only his view – for example, that Romanticism, one of the most widespread cultural tendencies of the age, was sick, so that Goethe’s Classicism had to fight it. In truth, even though Goethe remains the epoch’s outstanding writer, this kind of monolithic model no longer explains what we know of the literary situation and its development.

For example, the Enlightenment did not, as Goethe’s own Classic–Romantic dualism suggests, simply end with the onset of polemics against its rationalistic tendencies around 1795–6. August von Kotzebue (1761–1819), whose works dominated the German stage (including Weimar) from 1790 to well beyond his assassination, was a slavish (and, in a sense, masterly) imitator of Lessing’s Enlightenment dramas, to say nothing of Wieland, the father and son team of Voß, and a host of popular novelists. There emerged too a newly coherent body of literature by women such as Caroline Auguste Fischer and Karoline von Gunderrode. Nor is the epoch any longer clear cut. In the Biedermeierzeit (Age of the loyal subject–1815–48) an archetypal Romantic like Clemens Brentano assimilates central values of Restoration.

The 1980s were, if not a golden, at least a silver age for Italian fiction. That was certainly the view which many reviewers and publicists, and some novelists themselves, took of the matter, particularly in the first half of the decade. There was a substantial element of market hype in this evaluation, and indeed one of the most striking features of the literary scene from the late 1970s on has been the extent to which commercial criteria have become part of the public (and not just professional) discourse on literature. Quite explicit market pressures drive on the search for the ‘best-seller’ (on the model of the most recent exemplar, Il nome della rosa; the phenomenon is pored over by the literati as though it were some exotic beast, like Dürer's rhinoceros) or that for ‘new’ or ‘young’ writers, in a bid to oxygenate the waters of the literary pond. These are sustained, or demanded, by changes in the structure of the culture industry itself, including a concentration of ownership of publishing houses, an internationalisation of the market through take-overs or cooperation deals, and an ever more complex intertwining of interests in publishing, the printed media and television, all of which provide opportunities both for extending the interface between publisher and public and for promoting particular products and targeting specific groups of readers.

But this ‘triumph of narrative’ was also real, at least for a time. A larger number of books were published, sold and, presumably, read. There was also probably an improvement in the overall quality of fiction-writing. What the commercial expansion of the market ensured was that there was more space and greater visibility for writers for whom it might otherwise have been just that bit more difficult to make a mark. The new writers of the 1980s included some relative late-comers.

When in 1313–14 it began to circulate in Italy, the Inferno must have taken its first Tuscan readers by surprise. Dante Alighieri was a Florentine exile, a sophisticated poet and intellectual who, some twenty years earlier, had published a slim volume, a love story in vernacular verse and prose, entitled Vita Nuova. He was also known as the author of many other poems in the vernacular (sonnets, canzoni, ballads) which had placed him at the forefront of a small group of young poets active in Tuscany in the 1290s. However, his main claim to fame was probably of a different nature: in the year 1300 he had been one of Florence's six Priors, the highest public officers in the Commune. But his political career had been dramatically interrupted in 1301, when as a White Guelf he had been banished from his native city. Since that year he had been living in exile, mainly in Northern Italy, producing the occasional canzone but apparently involving himself more with philosophy and politics than with poetry. In fact, in the previous two to three years he had written various open letters advocating the restoration of the Holy Roman Empire under the rule of a German monarch, Henry VII of Luxembourg – the same Henry who had vainly besieged Florence in the autumn of 1312 and had died ten months later, near Siena, without having achieved much for himself or the Empire.

Introduction

Developments in literary historiography, especially in the last few decades, have called into question facile analyses, convenient categorisations, and underlying assumptions about the possibility of determining ‘real’ history. With the growing number of challenges to the belief that we in the present can establish a set of distinct truths about the past – with the doubt (propounded above all by postmodernists) about the possibility of a unified (clearly identified and defined, absolutely understood) self – and with the concomitant awareness (offered most recently by feminist scholars) that however much we can glean about the past, the usual sample that we have chosen has been narrow and limited, the writing and study of literary history have become more complex. Learning about history can no longer involve only the investigation of privileged individuals who have often been assumed to represent universally applicable characteristics and ideologies. We know that we need to broaden our study, to re-focus the lens, to think contextually.

We also know that the task of writing and thinking about history is one that cannot be marked by universalising statements. What we must acknowledge is the necessity on the part of (literary, but also other) historians for approximations and attempted assumptions. Given that every idea, every concept, even every category understood to represent some solid, dependable, credible, perhaps even absolute thing is now seen as socially constructed, as temporary, uncertain, and changeable, the most a literary historian can hope for is to provide an estimate of a time and place that she/he cannot ever fully know.

Alfieri

Together with Parini, the writer most admired by the Risorgimento patriots as the man who restored a civil and political conscience to Italian culture was Vittorio Alfieri (Asti, 1749 – Florence, 1803). After a period of restless and inconclusive study at the military academy in Turin, the favoured place of education of northern aristocrats, Alfieri visited various parts of Italy and Europe between 1766 and 1775, ‘about ten years of travel and dissolute conduct’ as he was to write in his autobiography: in other words, not the usual Grand Tour of young Settecento travellers but a continual flight from his own anxiety and discontent in a search for serenity and peace within himself which continued to elude him.

The third part of his Vita (‘Giovinezza’, ‘Youth’) provides some fleeting and revealing glimpses of his headlong dash across Europe: occasional encounters that would prove decisive for his intellectual development, as with Tomaso Valperga di Caluso in Lisbon; stormy love affairs that drag him into dangerous situations, like the duel with Penelope Pitt's husband in London; his disgust and contempt for the various courts of the ancien régime and their fawning, powdered courtiers; desultory reading, especially of French writers and philosophes; his liking for the desolate and stormy landscapes of Scandinavia and the bleak countryside and proud people of Spain.