The Formation of a National Audience in Italy, 1750–1890

Readers and Spectators of Italian Culture

Gabriella Romani, Jennifer Burns (Herausgeber)

Buch | Hardcover

308 Seiten

2017
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press (Verlag)
9781611478006 (ISBN)

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This book analyzes the process of cultural production and consumption in late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Italy and the ways in which authors, composers, publishers, performers, journalists, and editors engage with the anxieties and aspirations of their diverse audiences.

The late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries witness significant advancement in the production and, crucially, the consumption of culture in Italy. During the long process towards and beyond Italy becoming a nation-state in 1861, new modes of writing and performing – the novel, the self-help manual, theatrical improvisation – develop in response to new practices and technologies of production and distribution. Key to the emergence of an inclusive national audience in Italy is, however, the audience itself. A wide and varied body of consumers of culture, animated by the notion of an Italian national cultural identity, create in this period an increasingly complex demand for different cultural products. This body is energized by the wider access to education and to the Italian language brought about by educational reforms, by growing urbanization, by enhanced social mobility, and by transcultural connections across European borders.
This book investigates this process, analyzing the ways in which authors, composers, publishers, performers, journalists, and editors engage with the anxieties and aspirations of their diverse audiences. Fourteen essays by specialists in the field, exploring individual contexts and cases, demonstrate how interests related to gender, social class, cultural background and practices of reading and spectatorship, exert determining influence upon the production of culture in this period. They describe how women, men, and children from across the social and regional strata of the emerging nation contribute incrementally but actively to the idea and the growing reality of an Italian national cultural life. They show that from newspapers to salon performances, from letters to treatises in social science, from popular novels to literary criticism, from philosophical discussions to opera theaters, there is evidence in Italy in this period of unprecedented participation, crossing academic and popular cultures, in the formation of a national audience in Italy. This cultural transformation later produces the mass culture in Italy which underpins the major movements of the twentieth century and which undergoes new challenges and reformulations in the Italy we know today.

Gabriella Romani is associate professor of Italian at Seton Hall University Jennifer Burns is associate professor of Italian at University of Warwick

Acknowledgments
Introduction by Jennifer Burns and Gabriella Romani.
Readership and Consumerism
1.Giacomo Mannironi, The Economics of Reading: Cultural Consumption of Novels and letteratura amena in Eighteenth-Century Venice.
2.Roberto Risso, “The Virtue of Wanting.” Galatei and Readers in Nineteenth-Century Italy: Training the Citizen and Educating the Public between Bourgeois Values and the Risorgimento.
3.Gabriella Romani, National Readership and Cultural Consumerism in Late Nineteenth-Century Italy: Edmondo De Amicis and the Sentimental Appeal of his Fiction.
4.Giulia Brian, A “Question of Rule of Thumb!” Antonio Fogazzaro between Publishers and Readers.

Authorship, Readership and the Press
5.Martina Piperno, Constructing the Myth of Vico between Press and Literature (1802-1846).
6.Fabio Camilletti, Towards an Archaeology of Italian Modernity. Re-thinking the Classicist/Romantic Quarrel.
7.Federico Casari, Defining Young Audiences in Post-Unification Italy: Participation and Interaction in the

Erscheinungsdatum	22.06.2017
Co-Autor	Giacomo Mannironi, Roberto Risso, Giulia Brian
Zusatzinfo	1 b/w photos; 7 tables;
Verlagsort	Cranbury
Sprache	englisch
Maße	160 x 236 mm
Gewicht	649 g
Themenwelt	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918)
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
ISBN-13	9781611478006 / 9781611478006
Zustand	Neuware