Le livre de prix en Italie au XIXe siècle. Modèles étrangers pour un public nouveau

Résumé

The poster aims at showing how French literature entered Italy by means of the pedagogic tradition of giving books to pupils as an award. Since such prizes often represented the only book owned by a family, it was important to use them to educate people. As a matter of fact, Italian publishers still were not used to giving children their own proper literature, conceived and written for young readers. That is why educators, politicians and publishing houses looked abroad for some models and texts in order to make people more literate and to give a moral education to the new Italian citizens as well. The article focuses on the three different lines of action singled out in the poster, i.e. moral books, fairy tales, and adventures, and science popularization. Specifically, it aims at showing how French books were translated into Italian in different ways. For example, it is worthwhile pointing out that in the case of famous authors, no changes to the original edition were made. On the contrary, older fairy tale anthologies dating from the beginning of the century were properly reshaped by adding other stories, new images, etc. As far as popular science was concerned, the texts were supposed to meet their readers’ competence and taste, which is why Italian publishers added new material, both graphic and textual, that could interest their public.