Il libro fittizio. Storia e funzioni di un espediente letterario

The peper deals with the topos of fictional books, which are books that only exists inside others books. First, theoretical study about fictional books will be shown, such as the ones of Max Beerbohm and Lyon Sprague de Camp. Then, we will focus on the function of fictional books in some authors from the early modern to contemporary age. The first two trends are the satirical one, from François Rabelais’ Pantagruel, and the invention of the sources in Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quijote. During the twentieth century fictional books acquires more and more functions. We will analyze the cases of Jorge Luis Borges, who uses the fictional book in order to create fantastic worlds, and Italo Calvino, who uses books inside books as a metaliterary tool in the novel Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore (1979). These and other examples will be analyzed with the aim of understanding the reasons for the fortune of the fictional books over the centuries.