Recent Studies on Manzoni

The decade of the nineteen-seventies was a particularly fruitful one for Manzoni studies. Alongside Ezio Raimondi's seminal book, studies by Ferruccio Ulivi, Renzo Negri, Claudio Varese, Dante Isella, and Giorgio Petrocchi, with Giorgio Barberi Squarotti's book of the mid-sixties, applied contemporary methods of textual analysis to Manzoni's novel and placed it in the context of early European Romanticism.1 Generally it may be said that interest shifted from the characters of the novel to the text they inhabit. Of particular interest was the spirit and the stylistic and structural complexity of this text in its several versions. The five books under review here, which appeared between 1979 and 1982, reflect to very different degrees this significant work of the seventies. Pupino, following lines of inquiry similar to those of Raimondi and Isella, applies notions of the intertextual of Manzoni's texts in an original and fruitful way to the Colonna Infame. Barberi Squarotti develops an idea about the metaphorical nature of the novel into an allegorical interpretation that diverges profoundly from most recent Manzoni criticism. Puppo combines an interest in intellectual history with a Crocean perspective that keeps him outside the mainstream of Manzoni studies, but he tends to belong among the ranks of those who see Manzoni as an unquiet figure. The methods are similarly eclectic, ranging from Christian sociology and apologetics to the most up-to-date semiotic and narratological analyses. It is an interesting irony, whether or not it is relevant, that the critic who couches his argument deliberately in the most rigorously scientific, objective terms (Pupino) produces the most convincing case for the theological of a text (Storia della Colonna Infame). The five studies demonstrate a common interest in the ideology rather than the esthetics of the author or the text

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