The value of literary curiosity : Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's Letteratura Inglese

Abstract

Letteratura inglese was published in two volumes by Mondadori in 1990 and 1991, but, as is often the way with books received as presents, some considerable time passed by before I actually read it; and, as is always the way with books that one owns but has never read, I began mysteriously to formulate ideas about the work in the interim. This paper arises directly from the discrepancies between what I knew and felt about Letteratura inglese before that reading and what I knew and felt after it. On the one hand, for example, I knew from David Gilmour's biography, The Last Leopard, that the thousand-page manuscript of the lessons on English literature given by the author of II gattopardo between 1953 and 1954 constituted'... the most important document on his life that exists'. While on the other hand friends and colleagues who had read the books often relegated them to the status of a mere 'literary curiosity', lacking in sufficient accurate detail to be considered a useful history for the student of English literature and written in a too-personal style that excludes any objective value.