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This book offers an original approach to the presence of Continental European literatures in post-Napoleonic Britain. In doing so it reconstructs a literary and cultural environment in which patriotic discourse - the expression of a triumphant international power - combined with intensely transformative engagements with foreign literary traditions.
List of contents
Acknowledgements; Preface; Introduction: Continental literatures in Romantic-period Britain; 1. Periodicals and the construction of European literatures; 2. Interpreting nations: 1820s anthologies of foreign poetry; 3. Italian studies and cultural translation at Holland House; 4. Foreign presences on the national stage; 5. Continental voices and post-Napoleonic politics in Southey, Byron and Hemans; Coda: the European vistas of historical fiction; Notes; Select bibliography; Index.
About the author
Diego Saglia is Professor of English Literature at the Università degli Studi, Parma. He is the author of Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia (2000) and co-editor of British Romanticism and Italian Literature: Translating, Reviewing, Rewriting (with Laura Bandiera, 2005) and Byron and Italy (with Alan Rawes, 2017), as well as numerous critical essays in international journals.
Summary
Studies of British Romanticism have traditionally tended to envisage it as an intensely local, indeed insular, phenomenon. Yet, just as the seemingly isolated British Isles became more and more central in international geo-political and economic contexts between the 1780s and the 1830s, so too literature and culture were characterized by an increasingly close and relevant dialogue with foreign and especially Continental European traditions, both past and contemporary. Diego Saglia casts new light on the significantly transformative impact of this dialogue on Britain during the years that saw a return to unimpeded cross-border cultural traffic after the end of the Napoleonic emergency. Focusing on modes of translation and appropriation in a variety of literary and cultural forms, this book reconsiders the notion of the supposed intrinsic insularity of Britain through the lens of new key questions about the national, international and transnational features of Romantic-period literature and culture.
