The Formation of a National Audience in Italy, 1750–1890. Readers and Spectators of Italian Culture
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Alessandro Manzoni realized his characters had personal agendas in his benevolently amusing description of how he had to chase after them as they went about their own business.However, he likely ignored that the 25 readers of I promessi sposi were similarly active.The Formation of a National Audience in Italy, 1750-1890 shows just how involved and dynamic his readers turned out to be.The study is not about Manzoni, although he is not overlooked; rather, it is about the rapidly changing desires and attitudes of spectators and the reading public that developed in nineteenth-century Italy.Specialists of the period have come to expect sophisticated, well documented, and highly original work from the desk of Gabriella Romani.Once again, together with her co-editor, Jennifer Burns, she delivers admirably.Using as a point of departure studies on gaze, spectatorship, and reader reception, this compendium focuses on the Italian post-Risorgimento when Italians could no longer be divided into elite and not.As economic, educational, and social changes overturned traditional societal determinations, Italians became consumers as well, and as consumers, they demanded further sectorial divisions (gender, age, class, education, interest, politics) to support their consumption, including in literary matters.Consequently, writers, too, had to understand and address their readers as consumers and valid shapers of culture.The essays of this study are divided into three main sections.On the whole, the work does not define an audience, recognizing the multifaceted and unstable nature of the term.On the other hand, there are documented milestones that help describe audience.Giacomo Mannironi, in "The Economics of Reading Cultural Consumption of Novels and letteratura amena in Eighteenth-Century Venice," reminds us not to overlook the quantitative aspects of literature, including the price of books and cost of living.Roberto Risso's essay, "'The Virtue of Wanting': Galatei and Readers in Nineteenth-Century Italy: Training the Citizen and Educating the Public between Bourgeois Values and the Risorgimento," deals with self-help books that became popular once again in Italy after the success of Melchiorre Gioia's Nuovo Galateo.Here was an open admission, directed at different sectors of society and not just intended for upper classes, that the new Italy
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".