Pietro Chiari (1712-1785) and Carlo Gozzi (1720-1806) are well-known eighteenth-century Italian playwrights. Their polemical relationship has been the object of many studies, but there is a dearth of work dedicated to their narratives and novels, with none in English language scholarship, though a small and growing number of Italian studies of the novelistic genre in eighteenth-century Italy has emerged in recent years. In my dissertation entitled, Polemics and the Rise of the Venetian Novel: Pietro Aretino, Piero Chiari, and Carlo Gozzi, I examine the evolution of the Italian novel in a Venetian context in which authors, some through translation, some through new work, vie among themselves for the center in the contest to provide literary models that will shape and educate the Venetian subject.

I trace the evolution of the novel in Venice to the early modern, salacious author Pietro Aretino – specifically to his Sei giornate, or Ragionamenti –, as well as his influence on English and French libertine novels that eventually make their way back onto the peninsula through translation, and to the way in which agonistic relationships fueled literary output. I focus on three specific texts: Aretino’s Sei Giornate, Chiari’s La filosofessa italiana, and Gozzi’s translation of John Cleland’s Fanny Hill. Close readings of these three key literary texts, studied within their respective historical and cultural contexts and in comparison with each other, form the core of my dissertation. I utilize feminist and socio-political theory to approach case study analyses of these three literary works produced in Venice during the 1760s and 1770s, when social and cultural standards were beginning to break down in Venice. I use translation studies, the transmission of knowledge through communication networks and correspondence, and the periodical press to trace the cross-fertilization of texts between England, France, and Italy. I demonstrate the way in which salacious material and the use of female narrators such as Pietro Aretino’s Nanna and Cleland’s Fanny played a pivotal role in shaping the emergent novel in Venice to establish Italy’s role in the development of the eighteenth-century European novel. Specifically, the licentiousness of the female narrators, who represented both social mobility and an open female sexuality, revealed deeper tensions surrounding class and gender in Venice. Those tensions became the content of the emergent novel and also helped to shape the Venetian novel.