The Italian Idea
Anglo-Italian Radical Literary Culture, 1815–1823
Cambridge Studies in Romanticism Series

From 1815 to 1823 the Italian influence on English literature was at its zenith. While English tourists flocked to Italy, a pervasive Italianism coloured many facets of London life, including poetry, periodicals, translation, and even the Queen's trial of 1820. In this engaging study Will Bowers considers this radical interaction by pursuing two interrelated analyses. The first examines the Italian literary and political ideas absorbed by Romantic poets, particularly Lord Byron, Leigh Hunt, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. The second uncovers the ambassadorial role played in London by Italians, such as Serafino Buonaiuti and Ugo Foscolo, who promoted a revolutionary idea of their homeland and its literature, particularly Dante's Commedia. This dual-perspective study reveals the cosmopolitan challenge to Regency mores embodied in both the work of Italian literary exiles in London and the English poetic engagement with Italy.

1. Italians and the 'public mind' before 1815; 2. The genesis of an Italian style; 3. Foscolo, Hobhouse, and Holland House; 4. Venice redefined; 5. An almost revolutionary queen; 6. Sailing in the wind's eye.

Will Bowers is Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Thought at Queen Mary University of London. He has published widely on Leigh Hunt, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and Lord Byron in journals such as Essays in Criticism, Review of English Studies, and Romanticism on Net, and is the co-editor of Re-evaluating the Literary Coterie 1580–1830 (2016).