Con lo sguardo del nuovo romanzo poliziesco: da Camilleri alla novela negra spagnola

At the beginning of this study, the socio-cultural context of the 1990s is summarized as the period in which the work of Andrea Camilleri (1925-2019) reached full maturity, combining his point of view with a worldview – elements that form the basis of his narratives. The aim of this thesis is to demonstrate how the Sicilian writer began to modify and renew the formula of the detective genre, using his writings to comment on contemporary life, facing issues such as political corruption, social injustice, the power of organized crime. Camilleri effectively paved the way for the new Italian detective novel, elevating its dignity, transforming the text from a pleasurable and merely entertaining reading into a challenging one, finally establishing a constant correlation between chronicle, literary fiction and social criticism. He was able to create not only a new type of authorial figure, through himself, but also a new language, the vigatese, which perfectly suits both his protagonist, police inspector Salvo Montalbano, and his world. Camilleri is, therefore, unquestionably, one of the most important authors in contemporary Italian literature, deserving inclusion in a broader literary canon. Camilleri also had a significant pedagogical role, he was able to understand and represent the contemporary society, teaching readers to look at reality through an intellectual ethical gaze, placing strong emphasis on human characterization, the psychology of the protagonists, the places of origin, the socio-cultural and political context. His narrative thus is an effective “tool” to explore the nature of evil and to sustain a critical theory of society, making his detective novels extremely current and successful, even beyond the regional setting. The writer, in fact, inspired many authors of detective novels both in Italy and abroad. Finally, Camilleri also had a notable influence in Spain, with which he shared a unique reciprocal relationship, an aspect explored in the comparative section of this research.