title: Adventure and misadventure in the time of empire: a reading of Emilio Salgari’s Sandokan series and Hugo Pratt’s Corto Maltese series
Creators: name: Keenan, Niamh Sarah Rose
Publisher: name: The University of Edinburgh
Year: 2023
Subjects: subject: Paraliterature
subject: Adventure genre
subject: Emilio Salgari
subject: Hugo Pratt
subject: Pulp fiction
subject: Graphic novel
subject: Comic strips
subject: Empire
subject: Colonies
subject: Imperialism
subject: Colonialism
subject: Post-colonialism
subject: Decolonisation
subject: 1960s
subject: Sessantotto
subject: Italy
subject: Western world

description: Emilio Salgari's Sandokan series and Hugo Pratt's Corto Maltese series fall within paraliterature’s genre of adventure writing. The years of their publication, 1883-1913 and 1967-1989, respectively, correspond with two periods of flux in Italian colonial and imperial history: the Scramble for Africa and the anti-colonial movement of the Sessantotto. Both Salgari and Pratt were prolific authors with extensive readerships. Salgari is held by many to be the father figure of contemporary Italian adventure writing and Pratt is considered to be one of the greatest Italian exponents of the graphic novel. They are high among the ranks of the most commonly translated Italian authors. The stories selected for analysis from each of the series have for their protagonists formidable piratical figures, indifferent to authority and danger but faithful to their friends and compassionate to the oppressed. Notwithstanding the extent of their circulation, there has been little scholarly criticism of these texts; in particular, critical attention has not been paid to the relationship between the Sandokan and Corto Maltese series and colonial and imperial history and ideology. This thesis confronts that hiatus. Many critics have regarded such adventure texts, together with the entire panoply of paraliterary genres, as formulaic and escapist. This thesis posits that such texts are eminently capable of informing and engaging their audiences with important ideas of socio-political relevance. It has often been acknowledged that Italy has been relatively late in confronting its colonial and imperial past, with much important postcolonial literature emerging only over the past thirty years. The aim of this thesis is to demonstrate that the Sandokan series of the late-nineteenth century and the Corto Maltese series of the mid-twentieth century show evidence of an anti-colonial and anti-imperial stance. The thesis is divided into three chapters. The first chapter evaluates the nature of paraliterature and the genesis of its adventure genre. The second and third chapters examine two texts from each of Salgari's and Pratt's series. The analyses of these four texts look at the authors' choices and treatments of settings, secondary characters and the protagonists, Sandokan and Corto Maltese. A close reading of selected passages and panels displays the critical stance of these works. Ultimately, this thesis argues that there are manifestly anti-colonial and anti-imperial ideas present in both Salgari's Sandokan and Pratt's Corto Maltese series. It demonstrates that, not only is paraliterature capable of informing its readership and raising questions about the morality of colonialism and empire, it has the potential to shape opinion. Further, it contends that Salgari, writing at the time of Italy's expansionist mission, can be regarded as the more counter-cultural of the authors: Pratt's texts, though equally critical of the colonial and imperial mindset, accord more with the cultural zeitgeist of his period of writing.