I promessi sposi / Storia della colonna infame by Alessandro Manzoni

The traditional, almost universally shared interpretation of such events was metaphysical inasmuch as the plague-stricken communities tended to believe in supernatural causes such as God’s wrath, extraordinary astronomical events (e.g. The plague and other outbreaks of epidemics were frequent in early-modern Europe, and due to the limited competency of medical knowledge to tackle such scourges effectively, the political institutions tended to enforce drastic restrictions on individuals – the sick and the healthy as well – to reduce the contagion and avoid the spread of the disease. Keywords: The plague in literature Historical fiction Daniel Defoe Alessandro Manzoni Enlightenment Betrayal in literature These historical narratives outline a discourse that resonates with the current Covid-19 pandemic.

Their narrators – the witness and the omniscient historian – accept that language cannot domesticate evil and suffering by framing them in an image, and for this reason, they tell their stories by combining different genres and styles, creating hybridised narrative forms capable of challenging the ideological notion of disease beyond the cultural context of Enlightenment. Nonetheless, Defoe and Manzoni share the attempt to provide rational and truthful insight into the epidemic, its origins, and its social and economic consequences.

These tensions produce two different approaches to the plague and its narrative and two partially diverging evaluations of the interplay between fact and fiction in relation to such a traumatic event. They both devote to the plague two diptychs (Defoe with the Due Preparations for the Plague and A Journal of the Plague Year in 1722, and Manzoni with I promessi sposi and La storia della colonna infame in 1840) that encompass a tension between fiction and history, narrative and the archive. Between Fiction and History: Telling the Plague in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year and Alessandro Manzoni’s Storia della colonna infameĭaniel Defoe (1670-1731) and Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1873) represent two exemplary case studies of the European reflection about language, power, and pestilence in the context of Enlightenment due to their respective biographical positioning before and after that philosophical revolution.

I promessi sposi / Storia della colonna infame by Alessandro Manzoni