Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-cjp7w Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-07T18:21:34.830Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

4 - The Age of Permutations: 1915–1956

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 October 2023

Marco Malvestio
Affiliation:
Università degli Studi di Padova, Italy
Stefano Serafini
Affiliation:
University of Warwick
Get access

Summary

The Long Nineteenth Century

Writing in French in 1970 – and then translating into Italian, in 1980 – Italo Calvino, one of the major authors and theorists of Italian fantastic literature, maintained that

[n]ineteenth-century fantasy, a refined product of the Romantic spirit, soon became part of popular literature. (Poe wrote for the newspapers.) During the twentieth century, intellectual (no longer emotional) fantasy has become uppermost: play, irony, the winking eye, and also a meditation on the hidden desires and nightmares of contemporary man. (Calvino)

If this is the case for a group of now canonical writers, it is equally true that popular fiction, for the whole first half of the twentieth century, tended to adapt the deep-rooted topoi and motifs of the nineteenth-century Gothic and fantastic to a mutated socio-cultural and historical context. Moreover, many highbrow authors who were active between the late 1910s and the late 1950s did not shy away from genuinely disquieting and horrific effects, situations and descriptions; and – even when there is an insistence on the grotesque and citationism – the result is as often as not more uncanny than ironic.

In 1915, Carolina Invernizio, Italy's queen of the feuilleton, wrote L’atroce visione, published by Salani, after debuting as a novelist in 1877. The atrocious sight that gives the novel its title is the telepathic apparition of the dying mother of the protagonist, at the very moment of her death, claiming that she has been treacherously murdered. As is the case for many of her works, the novel takes the form of a stereotypical and gentrified Gothic narrative, but it is no less effective for that, with its numerous plot twists and its both real and fake supernatural apparitions. Invernizio herself passed away in 1916, but her books continued to be successfully reprinted for several decades.

A more curious case is that of Carlo H. De’ Medici, whose narrative output, between the 1920s and 1930s, had little (if not minimal) impact on the publishing market and yet he can now be regarded as one of the most accomplished exponents of the Italian Gothic. His novel Gomòria, originally published in 1921 by the Milanese Facchi, and his collection I topi del cimitero.

Type
Chapter
Information
Italian Gothic
An Edinburgh Companion
, pp. 63 - 75
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2023

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×