A damsel in distress, a dissipated nobleman, and a bandit secluded in his gloomy castle; murders, nightmares, a cloister full of secrets, the shadow of the Devil... This could be a perfect abstract of Manzoni's I promessi sposi, which appropriates and bends - to the limits of unrecognizable - some of the most stereotyped situations of the Gothic genre.

Fabio Camilletti is Professor of Italian Literature at the University of Warwick. His specialism is on late-modern and contemporary Italian literature and culture (18th-21st centuries), with a specific focus on the post-revolutionary/Romantic period, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gothic literature from a comparative perspective. He has published extensively on Alessandro Manzoni, Giacomo Leopardi, and the Classicist/Romantic quarrel of 1816-1827. Now, Professor Camilletti works on a forthcoming monograph focusing on the theme of the return of the dead in Italian culture, and the intersection between literature, politics, and contemporary folklore.

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