Silvia Amarante

Short presentation

Project title: Metafiction and pseudobiblia as cultural transfer in Nineteenth-century Italian prose fiction.

My research investigates Italian literary works of the nineteenth century that feature a metafictional and self-reflexive narrative, often built around false documents and translations, allegedly-found manuscripts and pseudobiblia (fictional books cited as real writings within other books). These meta-literary devices are often studied in the context of postmodern literature, but I contend that they were also widely employed in the long nineteenth century, thus making it fruitful to adopt some of the instruments of postmodernist criticism to study preceding works.

This project has also a transcultural and interdisciplinary dimension. While illuminating the role played by pseudobiblia in the creation of an autochthonous tradition of the novel in a nation which became politically unified only in 1861, I also study the influence that British novels cast on the Italian prose fiction and the negotiation and re-negotiation of identity through literature. The aim of my rhetorical analysis is to shed light on the dynamics of building a political and cultural identity across Italy and England in a crucial time for the establishment of modern democracies in Europe.