Ugo Foscolo And English Culture

"The history of the literary relations between Italy and England has its most celebrated early modern representative in Ugo Foscolo (1778-1827). Foscolo's translation of Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy is often regarded as the benchmark of his English experience, but there is more - around and beyond his relationship with Sterne - that can be uncovered. With over 3,000 letters spanning three decades, Foscolo's correspondence represents a unique perspective from which to monitor his literary, philosophical, and political views. The 'Epistolario' is also a space in which Foscolo engages with literary, philosophical, and moral questions, and a place where he exercises an often private form of literary criticism. These are letters which ultimately produce one of the most complete yet most composite self-portraits in the history of modern Italian autobiography. In the first comprehensive and historicized reading of Foscolo's correspondence, Sandra Parmegiani reveals the rich and complex relations between the Italian writer and the literature, philosophy, and culture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England."

One of the most celebrated Italian writers of the early Romantic period, Ugo Foscolo (1778–1827) was known primarily as a novelist, a poet, and a nationalist. Following the Napoleonic Wars, he lived in self-exile in England during the last decade of his life. There he wrote numerous critical essays and collaborated with Lord Byron and other well-known members of English literary circles. Ugo Foscolo’s Tragic Vision in Italy and England examines an underexplored aspect of Foscolo’s literary career: his tragic plays and critical essays on that genre. Rachel A. Walsh argues that for Foscolo tragedy was more than another genre in which to exercise his literary ambitions. It was the medium for an elaborate life-long process of self-examination and engagement with political and literary conflict. By analysing Foscolo’s tragic struggles on and off the stage, Walsh sheds new light on his career and how it reflects on the important literary and political trends of the time.

Originally published in 1953, this book presents a study of Ugo Foscolo's eleven years in Regency England. Using material that was previously unknown or unpublished, the text was written with the intention of providing an insight into his struggle as an artist within the broader currents of English society. Additional notes, appendices and illustrative figures are also included. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Foscolo, Romanticism and the Regency period.

The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism offers a comprehensive guide to the literature and thought of the Romantic period, and an overview of the latest research on this topic. Written by a team of international experts, the Handbook analyses all aspects of the Romantic movement, pinpointing its different historical phases and analysing the intellectual and political currents which shaped them. It gives particular attention to devolutionary trends, exploring the English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish strands in 'British' Romanticism and assessing the impact of the constitutional changes that brought into being the 'United Kingdom' at a time of revolutionary turbulence and international conflict. It also gives extensive coverage to the publishing and reception history of Romantic writing, highlighting the role of readers, reviewers, publishers, and institutions in shaping Romantic literary culture and transmitting its ideas and values. Divided into ten sections, each containing four or five chapters, the Handbook covers key themes and concepts in Romantic studies as well as less chartered topics such as freedom of speech, literature and drugs, Romantic oratory, and literary uses of dialect. All the major male and female Romantic authors are included along with numerous lesser-known writers, the emphasis throughout being on the diversity of Romantic writing and the complexities and internal divisions of the culture that sustained it. The volume strikes a balance between familiarity and novelty to provide an accessible guide to current thinking and a conceptual reorganization of this fast-moving field.

The Oxford Handbook of European Romanticism focuses on the period beginning with the French Revolution and extending to the uprisings of 1848 across Europe. It brings together leading scholars in the field to examine the intellectual, literary, philosophical, and political elements of European Romanticism. The volume begins with a series of chapters examining key texts written by major writers in languages including French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Hungarian, Greek, and Polish amongst others. Then follows a second section based on the naturally inter-disciplinary quality of Romanticism, encapsulated by the different discourses with which writers of the time, set up an internal comparative dynamic. These chapters highlight the sense a discourse gives of being written knowledgeably against other pretenders to completeness or comprehensiveness of understanding, and the Enlightenment encyclopaedic project. Discourses typically push their individual claims to resume European culture, collaborating and trying to assimilate each other in the process. The main examples featuring here are history, geography, drama, theology, language, geography, philosophy, political theory, the sciences, and the media. Each chapter offers original and individual interpretation of individual aspects of an inherently comparative world of individual writers and the discursive idioms to which they are historically subject. Together the forty-one chapters provide a comprehensive and unique overview of European Romanticism.

'Dante's British Public' examines the many and various ways in which the work of the leading poet of medieval Europe has been acquired, represented, and discussed by British readers over the last six centuries.

A dual-perspective study of how English engagement with Italy, and the work of Italian exiles in London, radicalised Romantic poetry.

"One of many writers inspired by Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, the German novelist Jean Paul Richter coined the term 'Shandean humour' in his work of aesthetic theory. The essays in this volume investigate how Sterne's humour functions, the reasons for its enduring appeal, and what role it played in identity-construction and in the representation of melancholy. In tracing its hitherto under-recognised impact both on literary writers, such as Jean Paul and Herman Melville, and on philosophers, including Hegel and Marx, the collection reveals that Shandean humour is a Grenzganger - a point of commerce not only between Anglophone and German discourses, but also between literature and philosophy. Klaus Vieweg is Professor of Philosophy at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena; James Vigus is postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of English and American Studies, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich; Kathleen M. Wheeler is Reader in English Literature at the University of Cambridge."