ISLG – Italian Studies Library Group presents The Mario Casalini Lecture 2023
A damsel in distress, a dissipated nobleman, and a bandit secluded in his gloomy castle; murders, nightmares, a cloister full of secrets, the shadow of the Devil… This could be a perfect abstract of Manzoni’s I promessi sposi, which appropriates and bends – to the limits of unrecognizable – some of the most stereotyped situations of the Gothic genre.
The Gothic genre is not only a repertoire of clichés. In the age of the Revolutions, the Gothic is perhaps the genre most effectively challenging secret facets of modernity, such as the problem of evil, deceiving nature of language, ghosts of history, limits of reason, and elusiveness of truth. In this light, I promessi sposi is arguably the most intimate Gothic novel of Italy’s literary history, distancing itself from the ‘hodgepodge of witches and spectres’ of coeval literature.
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Fabio Camilletti is Professor of Italian Literature at the University of Warwick. His specialism is on late-modern and contemporary Italian literature and culture (18th-21st centuries), with a specific focus on the post-revolutionary/Romantic period, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gothic literature from a comparative perspective. He has published extensively on Alessandro Manzoni, Giacomo Leopardi, and the Classicist/Romantic quarrel of 1816-1827. Now, Professor Camilletti works on a forthcoming monograph focusing on the theme of the return of the dead in Italian culture, and the intersection between literature, politics, and contemporary folklore.