The 1980s

Abstract

The 1980s were, if not a golden, at least a silver age for Italian fiction. That was certainly the view which many reviewers and publicists, and some novelists themselves, took of the matter, particularly in the first half of the decade. There was a substantial element of market hype in this evaluation, and indeed one of the most striking features of the literary scene from the late 1970s on has been the extent to which commercial criteria have become part of the public (and not just professional) discourse on literature. Quite explicit market pressures drive on the search for the ‘best-seller’ (on the model of the most recent exemplar, Il nome della rosa ; the phenomenon is pored over by the literati as though it were some exotic beast, like Dürer's rhinoceros) or that for ‘new’ or ‘young’ writers, in a bid to oxygenate the waters of the literary pond. These are sustained, or demanded, by changes in the structure of the culture industry itself, including a concentration of ownership of publishing houses, an internationalisation of the market through take-overs or cooperation deals, and an ever more complex intertwining of interests in publishing, the printed media and television, all of which provide opportunities both for extending the interface between publisher and public and for promoting particular products and targeting specific groups of readers. But this ‘triumph of narrative’ was also real, at least for a time. A larger number of books were published, sold and, presumably, read. There was also probably an improvement in the overall quality of fiction-writing. What the commercial expansion of the market ensured was that there was more space and greater visibility for writers for whom it might otherwise have been just that bit more difficult to make a mark. The new writers of the 1980s included some relative late-comers.

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