La Storia della letteratura italiana come romanzo

Abstract

Francesco De Sanctis’ History of Italian Literature is read in this paper as a novel, probably the most successful novel of the Italian Nineteenth-Century after The betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni. According to Ceserani’s interpretation, the structure of the book is based on three popular types of narrations written in that century: 1) the historical novel (or romance), in which reality and invention are combined and scenes of large masses alternate with scenes in which single great heroes (Dante, Machiavelli) are celebrated and represented in their monumentality; 2) the novel of education or Bildungsroman, but in this case the protagonist is not a single character, who constructs his individuality from youth to maturity; instead it is an entire people, who passes through different stages: a very creative and genuine one in the Trecento, an age of decadence during the Cinquecento and Seicento, a new start and a true renaissance in the modern times; 3) the bourgeois drama and the opera, with their penchant for dialectical contrasts and sharp conflicts.