French Literature Reviews - 2026

A. Gendrat-Claudel, Le paysage « fenêtre ouverte » sur le roman. Le cas de l'Italie romantique
Novel and Narrative Prose

Aurélie Gendrat-Claudel

Le paysage « fenêtre ouverte » sur le roman. Le cas de l'Italie romantique
PUPS (Paris-Sorbonne)
Coll. "Jalons - Littérature italienne"
27/08/2007
ISBN : 978-2-84050-530-3
446 p.
32 €

Publisher's blurb:

"Whenever I have tried to describe a landscape, the method to be followed in the description has become as important as the landscape described." With these words, Italo Calvino invites us to view landscape not merely as a referent for description, but as a work of pure literary craftsmanship. This book explores this possibility by focusing on a specific historical juncture: the difficult emergence of the novel in Italy during the first half of the 19th century. After tracing the theoretical and historical issues at stake in research on landscape description, the analysis examines four "case studies" (*The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis* by Foscolo, Manzoni's *The Betrothed*, Tommaseo's *Fede* [Fidelity], and Nievo's *Confessions of an Italian*), which form the canonical novels of the Romantic era. By combining a complex subject (landscape), a poetic question (description), a genre (the novel), and a historical moment (the birth of the modern Italian novel), this study demonstrates how landscape descriptions—often excerpted for anthologies—must instead be restored to their broader narrative context. Oscillating between symbolic saturation, plot suspension, stylistic virtuosity, and ornamental refinement, these descriptions harbor genuine poetic programs that arguably offer the novel its ultimate guarantee of legitimacy.

A former student of the École Normale Supérieure and holder of the *agrégation* in Italian, Aurélie Gendrat-Claudel is an Associate Professor at Paris-Sorbonne University. Her teaching, publications, and research focus on 19th- and 20th-century Italian literature (particularly the birth of the modern novel), description, landscape, the relationship between text and image, and the challenges of translation. This book is adapted from her doctoral dissertation, defended in November 2005 at Paris-Sorbonne University.

During the early nineteenth century, Italian literature underwent a profound transformation as writers sought to establish a modern narrative tradition. This period of Romanticism, closely tied to the cultural and political stirrings of the Risorgimento, saw authors grappling with the lack of a unified novelistic heritage. By focusing on landscape description, this study highlights how writers like Ugo Foscolo and Alessandro Manzoni used the representation of space not merely as decorative background, but as a vital tool to construct narrative structure and national identity.

This work is highly valuable for scholars and students of Italian literature, comparative aesthetics, and narrative theory. It addresses fundamental questions about the mechanics of description, demonstrating how textual depictions of the natural world function as poetic manifestos within the text. By reintegrating these famous passages into their broader narrative frameworks, the book offers a fresh methodology for reading nineteenth-century prose, making it an essential resource for those interested in the evolution of the European novel.