Il decennio delle antologie (1941-1951). Repertori letterari e logiche editoriali

This volume builds on a conference held at the “G. D’Annunzio” University of Chieti-Pescara in the spring of 2022 and examines the role of anthologies in the field of translated literature in Italy during the 1940s. Their relevance is identified and discussed through a collection of essays concerning a number of anthologies published in Bompiani’s “Pantheon” and De Carlo’s “Enciclopedia della novella” series between 1941 and 1951. These dates mark a decade characterized by an intense production of anthologies, within which parallel dialectics of editorial and literary competition developed. The contributions call attention to the editors and the actors involved in the conception and realization of such multifaceted products and, at the same time, reflect on the dynamics that concur to the creation of a canon. Depending on the policies of each publisher, the task of presenting the anthology as an independent literary form and genre, usually without pedagogic aims, is entrusted to renowned figures within each tradition – Germanists Leone Traverso and Alberto Spaini, Slavists Ettore Lo Gatto, Enrico Damiani and Tommaso Landolfi, translators such as Edoardo Bizzarri and Maria Martone, and eclectic figures such as Elio Vittorini, at once series editor and translator, Hispanist and Americanist. As emerges in the studies collected here, the “decade of anthologies” leads to a reconsideration of the anthology as a dynamic form in the Italian literary field, far from the mere representation of the literary scene of an era.