Rebuilding post-revolutionary identities in England, France and Italy: the reception, discussion and stigmatization of unruliness in novels through the periodical press (1816-31)

This project will explore how the English, French and Italian
periodical press of the Restoration (1816-31) interpreted the many
facets of Unruliness in the reception of national and foreign novels.
The focus will be on the novels’ reviews, which engaged extensively
with the topic of Unruliness, broadly conceived as referring to nonconforming or dissident elements, such as prohibited desires, forms
of ‘incorrect’ thinking, unruly behaviours, subversion of moral
normativity. The research addresses still uncharted aspects of the
intercultural relations occurring between the countries in a
comparative way, and will show how the press helped forge postrevolutionary cultural identities across the continent. The project has
three main aims:
a) catalogue and analyse data concerning the perception of
unruliness in the novels’ reviews through a comprehensive survey of
a wide body of printed sources, while exploring the transcultural
dimension of the corpus;
b) challenge the study of the post-revolutionary period through a
complex, albeit identifiable, conceptual category, with the aim of
collectively analysing discursive practices belonging to different
traditions;
c) create a methodological paradigm to study transcultural
phenomena of this kind in other geographical and temporal contexts.
Methodologically, I apply Digital Humanities (henceforth DH),
Sociology of Literature and Comparative Literature approaches along
with tools of Reader Response and Reception Studies.