Dictionnaires des anonymes et pseudonymes du xixe siècle : vers la construction d’une identité culturelle nationale

One of the most significant consequences of the emergence of the individualisation of writing and the originality of the literary work is the emergence in many countries of Europe of those that John Mullan defined "one of the great, but neglected, monuments to 19th-century scholarship" (Mullan 2008): the dictionaries of anonymous writers (that of Barbier for France, Paris 1806; that of Melzi for Italy, 1848-1859, with his continuations; that of S. Halkett and J. Laing, for Great Britain, Edinburgh, 1882-88). They constitute another significant testimony of the construction of a national canon including all the works representative of the genius of the nation, even those originally released without a name or with a pseudonym. These dictionaries help us to understand how librarians, collectors and booksellers described the various forms of authorship without an author, making observations, for example, on the habit of certain authors to always use the same pseudonym or to change it according to the different genres of their writing. Although these bibliographic tools have been widely used by scholars, the cultural and intellectual context in which they were conceived and organised was never analysed. One of aims of my lecture is to analyse Gaetano Melzi's way of proceeding in attributions, what his sources are, in case he reveals them. Given the theme of the conference, I will give examples on the attributions of works by 16th century authors considered heterodox.