Thesis title: Le roman de Rome. La représentation de la nouvelle capitale dans les romans italiens et français de la fin du XIXe et du début du XXe siècles
This thesis traces the evolution of the fictional representation of Rome after it became the capital of unified Italy. How did the city’s millennia-old image renew itself following this shift in political and symbolic status, to the point of inspiring, in fiction, the invention of the Terza Roma (“Third Rome”)? The novel genre – closely tied to modernity and the urban space – offered the best lens through which to analyze how writers sought to usher the young nation and its new capital into European modernity through literature. The study, based on a predominantly Italian corpus enriched with several French novels, opens a dual perspective – internal and external – and explores the perception of the city of Rome in the European imagination between the Capture of Rome (1870) and the First World War. While many studies address the Roman imaginary, none consider a binational corpus focused on the early decades of a capital where hopes, efforts, and disappointments associated with the “fictionalization” of a city – whose myth is being renewed – are crystallized. Through a sample of representative novels, the thesis is structured chronologically around three main parts. The first addresses the narrative legacy, the precursor novels, and the early portrayals of Rome in its first decade as capital; the second focuses on the last twenty years of the 19th century, during which a new tradition of Roman narrative takes root; finally, the third analyzes the latent disappointment and pessimism in novels from the turn of the century and the early 20th century—signs of the waning of the narrative construction of the capital. This trajectory reveals how the modern fiction of Rome, reflecting the city’s reality, led novelists from initial enthusiasm to resigned pessimism.