Madame Bovary in Italy
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Olivia Santovetti
Abstract
The final thirty years of the nineteenth century – which coincide with the first decades of the unified Italy – are the golden age of the Italian novel: for the first time ‘Italian’ and ‘novel’ combined to produce an “authentically Italian novel” (Asor Rosa). This extremely rich period is characterized by lively debates and great experimentation as well as by two main elements: the adoption, almost universally, of the realist mode, and the reference to French literature as a model. This chapter looks, first, at Franco-Italian cultural transfer; then it analyzes the influence that Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary had in Italian literary practice and in the rise of Italian realism. I pay special attention to four realist novels which reworked the bovarystic theme and explored the ‘dangers’ of novel-reading. I argue that in the age of realism the woman reader character becomes a self-reflexive device which enables the novel to reflect critically on its status, fictional and illusory, on its function and its readership, real and implied. My case studies offer a sample of the forms of realism in the late nineteenth-century Italian novel and address the following questions: the issue of morality in the novel (Antonio Fogazzaro’s Malombra, 1881), the ambivalent power of fiction (Matilde Serao’s Fantasia, 1884), the difficult legacy of romanticism (Federico De Roberto’s L’illusione, 1891), and the adoption of realist poetics (Marco Praga, La biondina, 1893).
Abstract
The final thirty years of the nineteenth century – which coincide with the first decades of the unified Italy – are the golden age of the Italian novel: for the first time ‘Italian’ and ‘novel’ combined to produce an “authentically Italian novel” (Asor Rosa). This extremely rich period is characterized by lively debates and great experimentation as well as by two main elements: the adoption, almost universally, of the realist mode, and the reference to French literature as a model. This chapter looks, first, at Franco-Italian cultural transfer; then it analyzes the influence that Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary had in Italian literary practice and in the rise of Italian realism. I pay special attention to four realist novels which reworked the bovarystic theme and explored the ‘dangers’ of novel-reading. I argue that in the age of realism the woman reader character becomes a self-reflexive device which enables the novel to reflect critically on its status, fictional and illusory, on its function and its readership, real and implied. My case studies offer a sample of the forms of realism in the late nineteenth-century Italian novel and address the following questions: the issue of morality in the novel (Antonio Fogazzaro’s Malombra, 1881), the ambivalent power of fiction (Matilde Serao’s Fantasia, 1884), the difficult legacy of romanticism (Federico De Roberto’s L’illusione, 1891), and the adoption of realist poetics (Marco Praga, La biondina, 1893).
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents vii
- List of illustrations xiii
- Editors’ preface and acknowledgments xv
- Note on translations, cross-references and documentation xvii
- Introduction 1
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Chapter 1. What is realism?
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Core essay
- What is realism? 31
-
Case studies
- The contest of realism 65
- How real is realism? 81
- The emergence of the novel in India and competing modes of realism 89
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Chapter 2. Routes into realism
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Core essay
- Routes into realism 103
-
Case studies
- Routes into realism 191
- Routes into American realism 213
- Realism and translation 231
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Chapter 3. Time and space
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Core essay
- Fleeting moments and unstable spaces 247
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Case studies
- Cartographic realism in nineteenth-century literature 321
- Mobile spaces 337
- Reclaiming space, mastering time in African postcolonial fiction 357
- Utopian island realism in J. M. Synge’s travel narrative of The Aran Islands and Tomás O’Crohan’s autobiography The Islander 373
- In-between spaces in Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore 387
- Haptic realism 403
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Chapter 4. Rereading nineteenth-century realism
-
Core essay
- Literary playing fields in motion 417
-
Case studies
- The French debate about Gustave Courbet’s pictorial realism and the dialogue between literature and art in the mid-nineteenth century 489
- Russian families, accidental and other 503
- The benefit of reading marginal forms 515
- Madame Bovary in Italy 531
- Eça and Machado 551
- Zola, realism and naturalism in late nineteenth-century Greece 565
- The polyphony of late nineteenth-century Baltic realism 577
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Chapter 5. Post-1900 transformations of realism
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Core essay
- Straw man or profligate son? 599
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Case studies
- Realism across borders 697
- Realism in play 715
- Realism and postcolonial subjectivity in the Black British Bildungsroman 735
- The rise and fall of socialist realism 751
- Realism in Anglo-American crime fiction 761
- Biographical fiction’s challenge to realism 775
- Notes on contributors 793
- Index 801
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents vii
- List of illustrations xiii
- Editors’ preface and acknowledgments xv
- Note on translations, cross-references and documentation xvii
- Introduction 1
-
Chapter 1. What is realism?
-
Core essay
- What is realism? 31
-
Case studies
- The contest of realism 65
- How real is realism? 81
- The emergence of the novel in India and competing modes of realism 89
-
Chapter 2. Routes into realism
-
Core essay
- Routes into realism 103
-
Case studies
- Routes into realism 191
- Routes into American realism 213
- Realism and translation 231
-
Chapter 3. Time and space
-
Core essay
- Fleeting moments and unstable spaces 247
-
Case studies
- Cartographic realism in nineteenth-century literature 321
- Mobile spaces 337
- Reclaiming space, mastering time in African postcolonial fiction 357
- Utopian island realism in J. M. Synge’s travel narrative of The Aran Islands and Tomás O’Crohan’s autobiography The Islander 373
- In-between spaces in Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore 387
- Haptic realism 403
-
Chapter 4. Rereading nineteenth-century realism
-
Core essay
- Literary playing fields in motion 417
-
Case studies
- The French debate about Gustave Courbet’s pictorial realism and the dialogue between literature and art in the mid-nineteenth century 489
- Russian families, accidental and other 503
- The benefit of reading marginal forms 515
- Madame Bovary in Italy 531
- Eça and Machado 551
- Zola, realism and naturalism in late nineteenth-century Greece 565
- The polyphony of late nineteenth-century Baltic realism 577
-
Chapter 5. Post-1900 transformations of realism
-
Core essay
- Straw man or profligate son? 599
-
Case studies
- Realism across borders 697
- Realism in play 715
- Realism and postcolonial subjectivity in the Black British Bildungsroman 735
- The rise and fall of socialist realism 751
- Realism in Anglo-American crime fiction 761
- Biographical fiction’s challenge to realism 775
- Notes on contributors 793
- Index 801
