Analoghi vituperî: le bibliografia del romanzo dei misteri in Italia

Ania, GF; Moloney, B

Abstract

The article furnishes a bibliography of the 19th-century Italian misteri, novels of urban mysteries in the style of Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris, 1842-43. The first translation of this appeared in Italy in 1843-44 and was widely read, with a spate of Italian mysteries subsequently being published all over the peninsula – the mysteries of Naples (the first), Trieste, Milan, Turin, and Rome, for example. Having identified almost eighty titles (previous studies refer to only about half this number), we introduce the bibliography with a discussion of the Italian version, looking at how the Sue model was adapted to deal with themes that were relevant to the Italian situation and the Italian reading public.
Few Italian cities of the time could be classed as a metropolis, so it was natural that the Italian mysteries had different starting points, such as the revolutionary events of 1848 or the unification process of 1870-71. Some misteri were written for the bourgeois reading public, while others were directed at the working classes. One of the main themes to emerge is anticlericalism: most revealingly, almost a quarter of our titles deal with either papal misgovernment or clerical immorality. Other targets were communism and anarchy, while many writers simply ‘jumped on the misteri bandwagon’, taking advantage of the commercial potential of the title.

Citation

Ania, G., & Moloney, B. (2004). Analoghi vituperî: le bibliografia del romanzo dei misteri in Italia

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2004
• Deposit Date: Feb 12, 2009
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 12, 2009
• Journal: La Bibliofilia
• Print ISSN: 00060941
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 106
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 173-213
• Keywords: Italian literature
• Related Public URLs: http://www.olschki.it/riviste/bibliof.htm; http://www.olschki.it/
• Additional Information: Additional Information : Article is in Italian