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Project

The reception of the English novel in the Italian literary press between 1700 and 1830: a transcultural enquiry into the early shaping of the modern Italian literary and cultural identity (FWOTM883)

My project aims to understand the reception and the perception of English novels through the Italian literary press over the “long 18th century” (1700-1830), addressing a still uncharted aspect of Anglo-Italian intercultural relations. The project will explore the transcultural dimension of a set of data relative to the dissemination, translations, critical reviews, and editorial advertisements of English novels in the Italian literary press in the era of the Enlightenment and early Romanticism. The corpus consists of 300 reviews published in the most relevant literary journals of the time across the Italian peninsula.

The research has three main objectives: the first consists in pinpointing the distinctive characteristics of Italian literary journalism, by carrying out a thematic, stylistic and discursive survey of the corpus; the second is to understand how the English novels were introduced to the Italian readership, censored and translated, which moral values they spread and how their reception influenced the Italian process of political and cultural unification in those crucial years; the third is to create a methodological paradigm that may be extended to the study of the reception of English novels in the literary journalism of other nations. Methodologically, I apply Digital Humanities (DH), Sociology of Literature and Comparative Literature approaches to the texts along with, at a subordinate level, tools of Reader Response and Reception Studies, History of the press
Date:1 Oct 2017 →  30 Sep 2020
Keywords:English Novel, Italian Press, literary press
Disciplines:Comparative literature studies