La poetica e la ricezione internazionale di Antonio Fogazzaro
:Attraverso il carteggio con i corrispondenti anglo-americani, francofoni e italiani

Abstract

My Ph.D. thesis La poetica e la ricezione internazionale di Antonio Fogazzaro focuses on the literary work of Antonio Fogazzaro (1842-1911), with a particular emphasis on the influence of the clash between science and spirituality, emerging from the European debates around Naturalism and Decadentism, on his poetics. In my research project I explored this influence in relation to still understudied correspondences held in the Bertoliana Library of Vicenza. They include a great number of letters between Fogazzaro and journalists, intellectuals, translators as well as Italian and foreign editors, which attest to the parallel growth of his artistic maturity and his fame. Among the most significant Fogazzaro’s Italian correspondents figure Edmondo De Amicis, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Luigi Capuana, Arturo Graf and Guido Mazzoni. Among the foreign correspondents figure: the Francophone Ferdinand Brunietière, Georges Hérelle, André M. Gladès, Robert Leger, Édouard Rod, and the editors Hachette, Calmann-Lévy…; the Anglo-American George Tyrrell, G. Haven Putnam, William Roscoe Thayer and Theodore Roosevelt. These letters conserved in the three Funds Rumor, Roi and Nardi, reveal the relationships Fogazzaro weaved over some decades, especially at the beginning of the 20th century and the following years with an entrepreneurial spirit. These relationships could barely be defined as marginal, as they connected him with a wider cultural community within and beyond the boundaries of Italy. Not only my study aimed to review from a different angle the evolution of Antonio Fogazzaro as an author, but also to study the reception of his literary works abroad and in particular in England, United States and France. My thesis is a critical edition of these correspondences preceded by a hermeneutical investigation of Fogazzaro’s poetics and international reception, taking into account the aesthetic, thematic and linguistic features of his novels, both in their original and translated versions.