The Rise of Italian Literary Historiography in Nineteenth-Century England

Introduction

The history of literary historiography is a field of research that requires further investigation. Its foundations were laid in England and Italy by René Wellek and Giovanni Getto in 1941 and 1942, respectively. Despite not being particularly vibrant, this field of study is still pursued by scholars.¹ However, not enough attention has been devoted to the histories of foreign literatures. Studying these works is important because they can better clarify the reception dynamics of single authors and genres abroad, they exemplify the general diffusion of theoretical and methodological tools, and they represent an intermediate step between the still-predominant approaches in literary historiography (which are generally centered around national traditions) and future perspectives in the present global environment.

The birth of Italian literary historiography in England was the result of complex dynamics involving multiple factors and different contributions, and extended throughout the nineteenth century. While France had already reached maturity during the 1810s with the works of Pierre-Louis Ginguené and J. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi,² it is impossible to find similar results in England until the middle of the century. The only work that stands out for its intrinsic merits (and for the wide attention devoted to it by literary critics) is that of Ugo Foscolo, who was exiled in England between 1816 and 1827.

The History of an Exile: Ugo Foscolo in England

A dominant tendency among critics is perceiving the numerous essays published by Foscolo during his English exile as the discrete components of a never-completed history of Italian literature. Mario Alighiero Manacorda was the first to collect and arrange these essays as parts of a coherent and extended project outlining the evolution of the Italian language and literature from the Middle Ages to the present.³ Despite being strongly criticized for its indisputable arbitrariness,⁴ Manacorda’s work stresses a necessity strongly felt by Foscolo (beginning with his ‘working plan,’ written in 1796)⁵ and culminated in the Epoche della lingua italiana, a series of eight essays derived from a course held in London in 1823 and published in part in English a year later, in the newly founded European Review. However, the reconstruction of the work resulted in a number of philological problems. The publication was not signed, and Foscolo had it translated from a lost Italian original. Moreover, the unpublished part was probably written in 1825 in support of a lawsuit against the director of the journal. Cesare Foligno provided the first critical edition of the Epoche in 1958. This publication was also strongly criticized by later reviewers because of its inclination to mix different materials and publication drafts in an effort to reconstruct the lost originals, while almost ignoring the texts actually published in 1824.⁶

The Epoche⁷ are introduced by two preliminary articles that lay the theoretical and historiographical groundwork for the following progression without hiding their militant approach. The second article (“Origin and Vicissitudes of the Italian Language,” published in August 1824), for example, immediately attacks the Crusca Academy, accused of being the first responsible for the decadence of the Italian language, and instead embraces the model of Dante Alighieri, who shaped his language not by imposing a single idiom, but by harmonically merging the best parts of all the dialects in the peninsula through the sensibility of his poetic genius. The following two articles (dedicated to the periods 1180–1230 and 1230–1280, respectively) do not even cover the time of Dante but are sufficient to illustrate the methodology adopted by Foscolo. Linguistic history, in fact, is always closely linked with political elements, while the effort to connect every part of human culture in a unified progression leads to a mode of expression that is very rich in detail albeit frequently anecdotal.⁸ The final four articles were not published in the European Review and shifted the focus solely to literary elements, while limiting the coverage to the sixteenth century.

However, the most significant problem with the Epoche is their actual influence in England. Multiple elements have suggested a lack of success. First of all, as...