Gothic Beginnings: 1764–1827

Abstract

Critical assumptions about the alleged ‘marginality’ of the Gothic in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Italian culture rely on an optical illusion. The semantic sphere encompassed by the term ‘Gothic’ is expressed by Italian writers through a set of definitions related to incorrect thinking, archaicity, and excess. Seen from this perspective, the ‘Gothic’ appears the Northern, monstrous Other to which Italian culture is supposed to resist. This chapter provides the historical framework for contextualising Italy’s relationship with the Gothic as a field of tensions, arguing that refusal and resistance, rather than being viewed as symptoms of a constitutive incompatibility should be seen as the consequences of specific cultural-historical processes, which had determined complex and oblique forms of incorporation, adaptation and metamorphosis. Italian culture was by no means marginal in the circulation of Gothic themes and motifs, as exemplified by popular novels and the works of, among others, Berchet, Polidori, Manzoni, and Leopardi.