Novelists

Manzoni's novel, a skilful blend of traditional values and new perspectives, pleased everybody, except a few ultra-conservatives and advanced radicals. Thus he could be the holy patron of traditionalists, and at the same time be claimed by some as the ideal forerunner of the new veristi, who, in the latter half of the century, inspired by French naturalism, aimed to make their fiction an even closer reflection of true life. Conservatives and innovators both acknowledged him as their master, in a controversy reproducing much of the theoretical weakness, and cultural and political pointlessness, of the classicism-versus-Romanticism battle. The real divide was between a literature which, in its forms and contents, was still a middle-class monopoly, and the largely oral culture of the illiterate or semi-literate masses which the educated minority did little to enfranchise and empower. The fact that many of the authors mentioned in this section (and others not mentioned) are hardly if ever read today is both a sign of their failure to anticipate the needs and aspirations of the new politically emancipated and educated readership which the Risorgimento would inevitably produce, and of their success in expressing the intellectual narrow-mindedness and political conservatism of their peers, who accorded them a fame which from our vantage point it would be simplistic to judge undeserved.