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The Betrothed - Alessandro Manzoni (week 1)

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Chad B. and Betty
The Betrothed - Alessandro Manzoni (week 1)

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The Betrothed (Alessandro Manzoni, 1827) is considered Italy's "national novel"; a founding masterpiece of its culture; "a classic that has never ceased shaping reality in Italy" (Italo Calvino); and "a gift to humanity" (Verdi). For its descriptions, history, characters, wit, and expansiveness, it draws comparisons to Tolstoy, Scott, Dickens, Thackery, and Melville. It is not only "the most famous and widely read novel in the Italian language," but also "the most inspirational novel of the Risorgimento."

It is set in early 17th-century Lombardy amid Spanish occupation and the extremes of famine, war, and plague. But its basic theme transcends "a given, concrete, historical crisis" to speak not only to "the Italian people as a whole," but to universal themes of love, faith, and justice.

The central protagonists are two peasant-born lovers who find themselves opposed by a corrupt local tyrant. Just as the titular lovers are emblematic of Italy's resistance to foreign domination, the setting--teeming with numerous characters and points-of-view, filtered through an omniscient narrator--evokes its fragmented polity and sense of Providential unity.

The Betrothed helped establish a common literary language across Italy's diverse regional dialects. Tackling a philological debate known as the questione della lingua, Manzoni spent nearly two decades reworking the novel's idiom, producing a hybrid Florentine dialect, both formal and vernacular, that endeavored to do for the nation linguistically what the Risorgimento would do for it politically.

Schedule:

  • Week 1 (September 21): Introduction-Chapter 8
  • Week 2 (October 5): Chapters 9-23
  • Week 3 (October 19): Chapters 24-38

The Betrothed (1844 translation):

The Betrothed (1924 translation):

The Betrothed (2022 translation):

NOTE: there is also a heavily-edited 1834 translation not listed here. It is about half the complete length (rendered as a 15h48m "dramatic reading" version on Librivox).

Supplemental:

This meetup is part of the series The Risorgimento.

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