Centro, periferia, maggiori e minori: il caso dei Promessi sposi

This essay partakes in the debate on the centre/periphery dichtomy, crucial to a strain of comparative studies on the novel that seeks to explain the workings of the literary world system. The essay takes issue with this model, highlighting its teleological bias and its Eurocentric – more specifically, anglo- and Francocentric – viewpoint. In particular, the essay shows how I promessi sposi by Alessandro Manzoni uses British novelistic conventions while at the same time altering them to a significant extent in response to powerful ideological pressures. As the story of its canonization shows, I promessi sposi has in fact contributed to building a shared, national-oriented social imaginary, with a rhetorical and imaginative power that goes along with a radical revision of the British models. Manzoni’s case shows, in other words, that the ‘periphery’ does not simply adapt what it receives from the ’centre’, it radically alters it, producing new meanings and achieving new effects, which only a narrow focus on each work’s context and afterlife can make visible.