This essay brings together recent literary critical studies on the eighteenth-
century Italian novel with those on book history and on reading. What
lay behind the distrust of the novel as a genre, impeding its development and its
diffusion in Italy? Church censorship was not the sole reason for the difficulties
the Italian novel faced in its emegence as a genre. The problems are a good deal
more complex. It was not only the censors and the clergy who took a negative
view of novels; writers themselves who had developed within the parameters of
official culture failed to identify with the new form, one, moreover, which was
intended to entertain. Literary historical studies in the last two decades enable
book historians to connect this work on the texts of the novels with the cultural
context in which certain printers and booksellers invested in a publishing genre
which, despite the difficulties it faced, managed to create a significant market
over the course of the eighteenth century, with numerous editions and counterfeit
editions, above all of works by the two most celebrated authors of the time,
Pietro Chiari and Antonio Piazza. Yet in order to create this market for the novel,
publisher-booksellers in Italy were obliged to adopt complex promotional strategies,
from pretending that these works were translations of successful French
or English novels to penning elaborate introductions for readers in which they
tried to reassure the detractors of the genre (conservative men of letters and eccclesiastical
censors). An example is the Venetian printer Angelo Pasinelli, who
in an Avviso al lettore prefixed to the edition of L\u2019uomo o sia memorie, ed avventure
del co, Di Senneval asserts that novels are merely a \u201cpleasurable pastime\u201d and are
soon forgotten, leaving the mind free for more serious reading. They therefore
present no danger to readers
