Truth and money: Writing and payment for it in the perception of Italian writers of the 18th–19th centuries

Abstract

The article, based on the Italian literature of the 18th–19th centuries, traces the relationship between the social status of the writer, his attitude to his work, on the one side, and the forms of remuneration for it, on the other. In contrast to the sociological approach, which considers the problem of “writer and money” mainly from the position of the reader, the author of the article, being a historian of literature, considers it from the position of the writer. The author shows that the attitude to literature as a way of earning money is a result of ideological shifts and changes in the writer’s social status. The development path of Italian writer in the period of 14th–19th centuries can be marked as follows: a scientist with knowledge inaccessible to the majority, mentor and defender of the truth at the beginning of the period and an artist expressing the moods and feelings of the majority, the ruler of the crowd and the hero of mass culture at its end. The evolution is vividly reflected in the transfer of semantic accents in the meaning of the word letterato and in the shift of words poets used to call themselves: letterato-poeta-scrittore-artista. The modifications also affected the organization of writer’s work: the solitude in silence, praised by Petrarch, in the romantic era was replaced by the demand for social activity, which during the 19th century takes more and more pronounced bourgeois forms. In Italy of the 18th century, they were stimulated by theater, in the 19th century by journalism.

Keywords:

literature and money, Italian literature, writer and his readership, letterato