The Lament for Italy: Byron, Dante and A. D. Hope

The Byron Journal, 2008

Although travel to Italy was an almost obligatory rite of passage for eighteenth-century milordi inglesi, the interests of these tourists were typically restricted to seeing and acquiring antiquities. Earlier travellers, such as Thomas Coryat in 1608 and Milton in 1638, had been more interested in contemporary than in ancient Italy, for they had considered travel and an acquaintance with other nations to be beneficial to their participation in a shared humanistic culture. Coryat had observed Italian life keenly and recorded his impressions minutely, while Milton had frequented the learned academies (where he won approval for his Latin poetry) and met Italian intellectuals, including Galileo, then in his fourth year under house arrest. In the eighteenth century, however, the educational aim of Continental travel narrowed from the broadly humanistic to the more specifically aesthetic, centred on classical art; and often enough even that aim was little more than a pretext for the acquisition of a superficial worldliness on an extended holiday. 1 Johann Joachim Winckelmann complained privately about the philistinism of the nominally distinguished English visitors to whom he was expected, as keeper of the Vatican antiquities and Rome's most prominent antiquarian, to give guided tours of the city. 2 In this increasingly commodified experience of the Italian past, the living contemporary land largely ceased to be of interest to Grand Tourists except insofar 1

Byron's copious correspondence in Italian shows two basic registers: the affective—typi-cal of his letters to Teresa Guiccioli—and the political, exemplified by a series of letters charting his involvement in the Greek cause, where Byron repeatedly used Italian as a sort of lingua franca. By analysing its stylistic features, communicative functions and self-reflective elements, this essay reads Byron's correspondence in Italian in the context of contemporary uses of the language and of the wider debate that developed in the early decades of the nineteenth century around the status of Italian as national language, at a time when the lack of political unity reverberated on the very existence of one written standard.

The reception of Byron in Europe, 2004

2018

The tragic story of Marino Faliero, the Doge of Venice who was executed for high treason in 1355, came to the attention of writers and artists of various European countries during the early nineteenth century thanks to a number of historians who published insightful works on the history of the Venetian Republic. Among those who were fascinated by the irascible old warrior who tried to overthrow the oligarchy on becoming head of state was Lord Byron. In 1821, the English poet published the historical drama Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice on the tragic end of a hero whose personal grievances with the Venetian Senate intertwined with an ill-fated plebeian rebellion against the nobility. Byron’s popularity in Italy brought the story to the attention of Italian romantic literary circles, where it was not only appreciated as a tragedy of honour and revenge, but also for its ideological implications in the context of the Risorgimento. This study focuses on the three translators who produced...

L'Analisi Linguistice e Letteraria, 2019

This article analyses Mary Shelley’s textual and critical approach to Dante. It focuses on her sources in Mme de Staël’s, J.C.L. Simonde de Sismondi’s, August Schlegel’s and Henry Francis Cary’s critical readings of Dante. By analysing Mary Shelley’s use of Dante in Rambles, it will be shown that Mary Shelley became a mediator and introduced contemporary Italian political readings of his work and anticipated the Victorian interest in Dante’s Vita Nuova.

2017

2024

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… Institut for Sprog, Litteratur og Kultur …, 2007

This essay partly gives a brief survey of the status of the Canzoniere in nineteenth-century England when the collection was finally translated in full into English, and partly traces the significance of Laura in English literature after eighteenth-century biographies had transformed her from a vague Platonic ideal into a real, existing woman. The essay therefore traces the complex interrelationship between biography, translation, fiction and poetry and the ongoing dialogue with Petrarch in such highly self-conscious writers as Byron, Foscolo, Collins and Christina Rossetti. For centuries Petrarch's note about Laura's death in his Virgil manuscript has been the object of much scholarly interest. The manuscript, now in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, would appear to have been very easily accessible in the nineteenth century when a young English visitor devoted her very special interest to it. 1 The visitor was none other than Mrs Anna Jameson (1794-1860) who by the mid nineteenth century had become one of the most popular female art critics in England. In a chapter on Petrarch and Laura in her book The Loves of the Poets of 1829, she describes her visit to the Ambrosiana: Gushing up like the waters of an intermittent fountain, there was a sudden flow of feeling and memory came over my heart:-I stood for some moments silently contemplating the name of LAURA, in the pale, half-effaced characters traced by the hand of her lover, that name with which his genius and his love have filled the earth. Confused thoughts of the mingling of vanity and glory,-of the 'poco polvere che nulla sente', and the immortality of deified beauty were crowded in my mind. When all were gone, I turned back, and gave the guide a 1 Petrarch's Virgil manuscript also came top of the list when, in 1863, the young poet A.C. Swinburne advised his sister Alice on what to see in Milan: "But at Milan you will have enough to do. 1st, the Ambrosian Library, where there is a Virgil illuminated or painted in small by Simone Menni (?) for Petrarca;"