Synopses & Reviews
Starting with a new understanding of what Romantic-era literature is—and who wrote it—the essays here reassess British Romanticism in light of Dante, Ariosto, Tasso, Alfieri, and contemporary Italian figures such as Paganini and the improvvisatore Tommaso Sgricci. The British absorption of Italian literature and culture was mediated by authors residing in Florence, Naples, Pisa, and Rome, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, Hunt, Byron, the Shelleys, and Hemans. Providing insight on topics from the artistic practice of improvisation to the politics of nationalism, this learned volume breaks new ground and significantly extends our understanding of the relations between British and Italian culture.
Review
“This volume, which brings together several of the most authoritative scholars in the field, represents a landmark in the study of Anglo-Italian literary and cultural relations in the Romantic period. It succeeds brilliantly in combining two very different but complementary virtues. On the one hand it revisits, in unexpected and illuminating ways, well-chartered territory such as the Romantic poets reading of Dante, their experience of the Grand Tour, their perception of Italian history and of modern Italy. On the other hand it opens up new areas of cultural investigation reflecting recent approaches to the canons and contexts of British Romanticism: these include the influence of Italian theatre, visual arts, grand opera, improvisational performance, not to mention the Italian language itself, on early nineteenth-century English literature and drama. Challenging new attention is paid to relatively non-canonical authors, among them hitherto little-discussed women writers and ‘illegitimate dramatists. Dante and Italy in British Romanticism throws much-needed light on a crucial period of political and social transformation in Italy, as seen from the critical but sympathetic viewpoint of contemporary British intellectuals, reaffirming the centrality of Dantes role in the formation and interpretation of Italys late and contradictory identity as a nation.”--Lilla Maria Crisafulli, University of Bologna
Synopsis
From the artistic practice of improvisation to the politics of nationalism, the essays in this volume break new ground and significantly extend our understanding of the relations between British and Italian culture in its analysis of the reception of Dante and Italian literature in British Romanticism.
Synopsis
Participating in the current trend to move beyond national boundaries, these essays examine the influences of Dante, Ariosto, Tasso, Alfieri, and other major Italian writers on British writers who spent time in Italy: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Hunt, Byron, Shelley, Mary Shelley, and Felicia Hemans. Providing insight on topics from the artistic practice of improvisation to the politics of nationalism, this volume breaks new ground and significantly extend our understanding of the relations between British and Italian culture.
About the Author
Frederick Burwick is a Professor Emeritus at UCLA, where he taught courses on Romantic drama and directed student performances of a dozen plays. He is the author and editor of twenty-six books and over a hundred articles. His most recent publications are Romantic Drama: Acting and Reacting and Playing to the Crowd: London Popular Theatre, 1780-1830 (forthcoming). His study, Poetic Madness and the Romantic Imagination, won the Book of the Year Award of the International Conference on Romanticism and he was named Distinguished Scholar by both the British Academy (1992) and the Keats-Shelley Association (1998).
Paul Douglass is a Professor of English and American Literature at San Jose State University, where he also directs the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies. His publications include Lady Caroline Lamb: A Biography; The Whole Disgraceful Truth: Selected Letters of Lady Caroline Lamb, and The Collected Works of Lady Caroline Lamb (with Leigh Wetherall Dickson), among others. He was selected as a recipient of the Elma Dangerfield Award of the International Byron Society in 2007 and was named San Jose State's "President's Scholar" in 2009.
Table of Contents
Introduction--Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass * Wordsworths Italian Encounters--Marilyn Gaull * Sitting in Dantes Throne: Wordsworth and Italian Nationalism--Bruce Graver * Byron Between Ariosto and Tasso--Nicholas Halmi * Byron and Alfieri--Peter Cochran * Picturing Byron's Italy and Italians: Finden's Illustrations to Byron's Life and Works--Paul Douglass * Realms without a Name: Shelley and Italys Intenser Day--Michael ONeill * Epipsychidion, Dante, and the Renewable Life--Stuart Curran * The Poetry of Philology: Burckhardts Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy and Mary Shelleys Valperga--Tilottama Rajan * Hemanss Record of Dante: "The Maremma" and the Intertextual Poetics of Plenitude--Diego Saglia * Germaine de Staëls Corinne, or Italy (1807) and the Performance of Romanticism(s)--Diane Long Hoeveler * Coleridge, Sgricci, and the Shows of London: Improvising in Print and Performance--Angela Esterhammer * Masaniello on the London Stage--Frederick Burwick * Re-Visioning Rimini: Dante in the Cockney School--Jeffrey N. Cox * “Syllables of the Sweet South”: The Sound of Italian in the Romantic Period--Timothy Webb