Original scientific paper
Alfieri’s Merope in Split in 18??
Cvijeta Pavlović
orcid.org/0000-0002-5800-961X
Abstract
Vittorio Alfieri (Asti, 1749 – Florence, 1803), Italian playwright, poet and prosaist, born to an aristocratic Piedmontese family, together with Vincenzo Monti (1754 - 1828) and Giuseppe Parini (1729 - 1799), is the most representative author of the Italian neoclassical literature in the second half of the 18th century. Alfieri is the first author of that renowned trefoil whose work was translated into Croatian, which marked the reception of the Italian literary Neoclassicism variety in Croatian culture and in Croatian language. The Croatian translation of the tragedy of Merope was probably not printed in 1800 but in 1852 in Split, thus moving the work to the second half of the 19th century, however that precise translation introduced a particular Italian symbiosis of Neoclassicism and pre-Romantic and Romantic features into the Croatian literary tradition, which was, to a great extent, in conformity with Croatian stylistic and form-related features of the 19th century.
Alfieri`s overall work emphasises ethical and political awareness of a lone fighter for free order, as well as malicious effects of passion which force the protagonists to choose death. In Alfieri`s work, the pre-Romantic ideals of new sentimentality form a peculiar bond with the genre of tragedy, theretofore uncommon in the Italian tradition and the neoclassical expression withdrawing in Europe. The analysis is focussed on the relation of the fictional “architecture” and the construction of a solid and harmonious form of neoclassical tragedy (with strictly set framework of composition and structure aspiring to achieve classical clarity, simplicity and geometrical form) towards new plots (topics and heroes) which sparked interest at the beginning of the 19th century in Europe, Italy and Croatia.
Keywords
Vittorio Alfieri; Merope; translation; reception; Romantic classicism
Hrčak ID:
99694
URI
Publication date:
25.2.2013.
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