Il feuilleton di Luigi Natoli: dal romanzo d’appendice ai nuovi media

In analyzing the vast textual corpus of Luigi Natoli (1857–1941), it has emerged that his narrative literature can be considered as an archetype of the novel published in installments and the epitome of the history and customs of Sicily. At the fin de siècle, characterized as it was by fervid cultural unrest, Natoli, who was known universally for The Blessed Paulists (I Beati Paoli), continued his activity as a writer, journalist, researcher, critic, poet, and playwright, all while remaining in the shadows, not only due to critical indifference regarding popular literature and novels published in installments—in juxtaposition with “high” literature—but also due to Natoli’s adoption of several pseudonyms. Natoli published literary gleanings under the names Rapsodo, Lo Spigolatore, Maurus, Un topo di biblioteca, and Grifeo, some of which were later collected in Storie e leggende (1892), which would form a zibaldone, or a notebook, for future feuilletons in which he employed the pseudonym of William Galt. His two personalities were diametrically opposed and, at the same time, were central in his poetics: on the one hand, we have the auto-didact historian, the authoritative professor who published critical works, poetry, and textbooks under his own name; on the other, we have the brilliant journalist and creative writer of feuilletons who employed noms de plume. Spanning historical and adventure novels to novels published in installments and detective novels, Natoli’s narrative literature offers fertile ground for the comprehension of texts influenced by 19th-century popular narrative fiction and for the history of the Italian feuilleton. Natoli’s novels in installments testify to the metanarrativity and transmediality of the new media and lead back to a literary and popular double coding for both a mass and elite audience. The intermediality of his feuilletons accentuates the exploitation of Natoli’s narrative production as a multimedial crossroads, as in the case of the trilogy devoted to the 18th-century secret society of mysterious blindfolded men, conceived as a backwards theatrical technique that cannot be reconciled with the romanticized accounts of the Mafia’s progenitors in popular imagination.

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.