Abstract

The article aims to demonstrate that Umberto Eco’s author name is a reference point for successful Italian novels on a global scale. Starting from the debate about Eco’s name associated to an apocryphal text such as Q (Luther Blissett, 1999) in international reviews, the essay attempts to reconstruct an Eco model, in order to test its consistency: first of all, questioning whether this model really refers to the historical novel, as the reviews suggest; and, more generally, whether the reference to the author is really due to the literary genre. This reference seems to have relevance linked on the one hand to The Name of the Rose as an example of the «Italian way to postmodernism», and on the other as the first Italian novel to be highly successful on a transnational editorial market