«Spazio e tempo di un paesaggio storico». La proposta di Carlo Dionisotti

From 1967 the essay Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana is a classic in italian literary historiography. To understand better his nature is important to contextualize the origin of the paper: Dionisotti, arrived in England in 1948, settled the beginning of this critical analysis in contemporary italian history and in the national pride of his generation. In this original proposition he opens a discussion about the unity of italian literature, if considered from a geografical and chronological viewpoint: resting on eighteenth-century scholarship, the critic goes through the epochs of our tradition proving it much more discontinuous than the Romantics believed. He pays specific attention to the 1500s, when, thanks to Pietro Bembo’s stilistic reform, italian literature really began; wherease about seventeenth-century not only he points out the delay of historical research but also dialogues with Benedetto Croce, esteemed as historian but rejected for his aesthetic theory.