(Middle)browsing Mondadori’s Archive: British Novels in the Medusa Series, 1933-1945

Working at the intersection between the publishing world and literary history, this article uses the archival materials – correspondence and readers’ reports – preserved at the Mondadori Foundation in Milan to investigate the modes and presence of English literature within the Medusa series, launched by Mondadori in 1933 to host translations of foreign novels. Archival materials allow to illuminate two significant aspects of Anglo-Italian literary transfer: thanks to its strong connections with London, Mondadori played a key role in establishing transnational publishing ventures (i.e. Albatross) that played a key role in the development of a European modern (and not only modernist) novelistic canon. This very fact was crucial when it came to implement the British catalogue of the Medusa series, responsible for the introduction of contemporary, quality and highly readable novels, in a word, of middlebrow novels. Focussing on selected case studies, this article will show how the Medusa British catalogue actually opened new perspectives that were crucial for the subsequent development of the Italian novel.