Giulia Ricca is Assistant Professor of Humanities at the Hamilton School. Ricca is a literary scholar, whose work focuses on the European novel. She is the author of Epifania Italiana. I classici di Joyce (Italian Epiphany: Joyce’s Classics, Inschibboleth, 2024), as well as several articles and book chapters on twentieth-century Italian poetry, modern non-fiction, the essayistic tradition, and recent developments in literary criticism.
Giulia Ricca is working on a book about Alessandro Manzoni’s 1840 masterpiece I promessi sposi (The Betrothed). The project is an exploration of Manzoni’s moral unease with the genre of the novel and his eventual renunciation of literature on spiritual and ethical grounds—a tension between art and Truth rooted in Platonic and Augustinian thought. Ricca’s book investigates the aesthetic short-circuits these positions produce within the work itself—how they affect, specifically, the representation of speech, love, and beauty, aspects that are driven into silence by the protagonist Lucia Mondella. The study reinterprets what has often been deemed “insipid” about the novel and this character in particular—an excess of reticence and an elusive beauty—as Manzoni’s unique attempt at reaching an aesthetic of silence and representing the mystery of Christian beauty in a narrative work.
The book also offers a literary perspective on the legacy of Italian and European Catholic Enlightenment, as I promessi sposi is a novel of ideas at the crossroads of Catholic thought and Enlightenment philosophy. It repositions Manzoni as a European author in dialogue with Fielding and Richardson, whom he read in French, and, by considering the presence of authors like Apuleius and Boccaccio in I promessi sposi, sheds light on the novel’s broader narrative tradition.
“Infelice chi legge. Anna, Kitty Lucia e la morale del romanzo” (“Unhappy Is She Who Reads: Anna, Kitty, Lucia, and the Novel’s Moral”), in Letteratura permanente. Poeti, scrittori, critici per Giorgio Ficara, ed. I. Candido, C. Fenoglio, R. Palumbo Mosca, G. Ricca, D. Santero (Roma: La Nave di Teseo, 2022), 340-354.
“Alfonso Berardinelli e la «presunzione» del canone” (“Alfonso Berardinelli and the Canon’s Presumption’’), in La realtà rappresentata. Antologia della critica sulla forma romanzo 2000-2016, ed. R. Palumbo Mosca (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2019), 345-354.
“L’«illuminismo trascendentale» di Massimo Onofri” (“Massimo Onofri’s Transcendental Enlightenment”), in La realtà rappresentata. Antologia della critica sulla forma romanzo 2000-2016, ed. R. Palumbo Mosca (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2019), 355-366.
“I mondi paralleli di Praz e Cecchi” (“Cecchi and Praz’s Parallel Worlds”) Lettere Italiane 1 (2020), 42-61.
“Una questione privata. La critica di Cesare Garboli” (“A Private Question: Cesare Garboli’s Literary Criticism”) Paragone 144-6 (2019), 149-159.
“Like an Alchemist: The Artist between D’Annunzio and Joyce” Modern Language Notes 1 (2017), 121-133.
“Il terzo stadio della bellezza”: epifania e realismo in d’Annunzio e Joyce” (“The Third Quality of Beauty: Epiphany and Realism Between D’Annunzio and Joyce”) Lettere Italiane 1 (2016), 42-65.
“Mario Novaro sinologo tra Malebranche e il Tao” (“Mario Novaro Sinologist Between Malebranche and Taoism”) Lettere Italiane 4 (2016), 588-602.
