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Bagatelle, Bamboccerie, and Bordellerie: the Critics and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century Italy

Abstract The essay explores the critical response to the arrival of the eighteenth-century novel in Italy. Although contemporary works of fiction such as Richardson's Pamela and Fielding's Tom Jones were widely available in English and in translation, and gave rise to a number of popular stage adaptations, critics continued to draw on the epic and late-Renaissance literary theory in their discussions of the genre until at least the middle of the century. When, however, the first novels written in Italian for a domestic market began to appear in Venice in the 1750s, contributing to the rise of 'letteratura amena' or light reading, new critical voices came to the fore, often from the world of journalism. In a debate that lurched between the vituperative and the witty, many of the concerns regarding language, morality, aesthetics, and readerships which will exercise critics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are first raised here.