Alessandro Manzoni – författare

Set in Lombardy during the Spanish occupation of the late 1620s, The Betrothed tells the story of two young lovers, Renzo and Lucia, prevented from marrying by the petty tyrant Don Rodrigo, who desires Lucia for himself. Forced to flee, they are then cruelly separated, and must face many dangers including plague, famine and imprisonment, and confront a variety of strange characters - the mysterious Nun of Monza, the fiery Father Cristoforo and the sinister 'Unnamed' - in their struggle to be reunited. A vigorous portrayal of enduring passion, The Betrothed's exploration of love, power and faith presents a whirling panorama of seventeenth-century Italian life and is one of the greatest European historical novels.

A leading figure in Italian Romanticism and the Risorgimento, Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1873) is best known for The Betrothed, a historical novel set in northern Italy in the early seventeenth century. Although the success of this monumental novel eclipsed his reputation as a playwright, Manzoni himself prominently placed his two verse tragedies, The Count of Carmagnola (1820) and Adelchis (1822), at the beginning of a volume of his complete works, emphasizing their personal significance in his oeuvre. Both dramas reflect Manzoni's lifelong passion for history and confirm Georg Lukacs's assessment of Manzoni as "the most important exponent of historical drama at the time in Western Europe." Adelchis, set at the end of the eighth century, describes the events that led to the fall of the Lombard Kingdom under the joint reign of Desiderius and his son Adelchis. The Count of Carmagnola chronicles the conflict between the title character, a fiery Renaissance general, and the Republic of Venice.In his enthusiastic review of The Count of Carmagnola, Goethe congratulated Manzoni for "having abandoned the old rules and made such serious and firm progress on the new path that one can now form new rules on the model of this work." Now, translator Federica Brunori Deigan presents lyrical English-language versions of these two tragedies which, taken together, dramatize the first two epochs in Manzoni's "history of Italy." ( The Betrothed completes the triptych, illustrating the period of Spanish domination.) Long unavailable in English, The Count of Carmagnola and Adelchis are distinguished by their dramatic power and thematic gravity. Manzoni considers the interactions of Christian morals and Machiavellian politics through deft psychological portraiture, ultimately revealing the course of history as a fabric woven by individuals free will according to a logical pattern of actions and reactions, within the vaster providential plan, that human eyes can only dimly perceive.In her extensive introduction, Deigan describes Manzoni's life and times; places the two tragedies in the context of historical dramas by Goethe, Schiller, Byron, and Hugo; and highlights Manzoni's synthesis of diverse literary traditions: Shakespeare's tragedies and histories, German and French romanticism, and Dantean influences. Also included are a thorough bibliography of Manzonian scholarship, as well as Manzoni's original preface to Carmagnola and his historical notes to the tragedies, which provide additional insight into his complex thoughts on politics, history, and the dramatic arts.

Alessandro Manzoni was a giant of nineteenth-century European literature whose I promessi sposi (The Betrothed, 1928) is ranked with War and Peace as marking the summit of the historical novel. Manzoni wrote "Del romanzo storico" ("On the Historical Novel") during the twenty years he spent revising I promessi sposi. This first English translation of On the Historical Novel reflects the insights of a great craftsman and the misgivings of a profound thinker. It brings up to the nineteenth century the long war between poetry and history, tracing the idea of the historical novel from its origins in classical antiquity. It declares the historical novel—and presumably I promessi sposi itself—dead as a genre. Or perhaps it justifies I promessi sposi as the climax of a genre and the end of a stage of human consciousness. Its importance lies both in its prospective and in its retrospective contributions to literary debate.