Fenomeni (para)letterari a confronto: il romanzo d’appendice in Grecia e in Italia nell’Ottocento

Paraliterature tends to merge or overlap with popular literature, due to the very ambiguity of the concept of “popular”. What is meant by popular literature and paraliterature is a question that various efforts have attempted to explain. Popular, anonymous literature primarily represents the expression of the popular masses, which draws themes and stories from various irregular characters (think of the famous figure of Karaghiozis in the shadow theatre, for example), from brigands, from bucolic dramas, etc. and it is also directly linked to oral diffusion, which also remains alive in parallel with printed diffusion, including the many Venetian editions of vernacular Greek works which already appeared in the 16th century. In the Greek cultural vacuum of the mid-nineteenth century, the Western paradigm, with Italian and French operettas and theatre, German painting and architecture, and literary translations, imposed itself extremely easily. The same can be said for popular literature, which today is considerably enriched by older texts, but primarily by contemporary French production. That phenomenon which was becoming established in those years in the West, namely low-cost popular literature, the feuilleton, also took hold in the urban sprawl of the periphery and in Greece itself, now that the printing houses were being established in the various Greek cities and especially in the capital Athens. Regarding the diffusion of the phenomenon in question, two examples will be considered: the narrative of the Italian Francesco Mastriani and the pioneering experimentation of the Greek Marinos Papadopulos Vretòs, both descendants of the more famous French model of Eugène Sue.