The Italian Idea: Anglo-Italian Radical Literary Culture, 1815–1823 by Will Bowers (review)

In his preface to The Italian Idea, Will Bowers recalls a classic line from the hit 80's BBC comedy show Blackadder: Rowan Atkinson as 'Edmund Blackadder' satirizes the Romantic poets in a coffee house: '"there's nothing intellectual about wandering around Italy in a big shirt, trying to get laid".' The book sets out to make an important distinction at the outset between the idea of Italy experienced as a seductive Romantic dream and the more grounded interrogation of poetics/politics which emerged from the integration of Italian culture into radical Romantic circles in England between 1815–1823. In this sense, it marks a significant departure from studies of the 'construction' of Italy as a source of the picturesque and the sublime, moving away from what Chloe Chard has referred to in her essay 'Nakedness and Tourism: Classical Sculpture and the Imaginative Geography of the Grand Tour' as a preoccupation with 'the drama and excess of Italy' produced by the Grand Tour (Oxford Art Journal, 18.1, 1995, p. 17). Instead, it aims to examine the 'reawakening' of Italian influence on English radical poetry and the role that immigration (the actual presence of Italian migrants in Britain) played in moving Italian culture to 'the centre' of post-Congress of Vienna radicalism in London. In this respect, it is part of a recent conversation which attempts to reassess the links between British and Italian culture, among them Maria Schoina's Romantic 'Anglo Italians' (2009), Arnold Schmidt's Byron and The Rhetoric of Italian Nationalism (2010) and essays in the recent collection edited by Alan Rawes and Diego Saglia, Byron and Italy (2018).

In Chapter 1, Bowers set outs to evaluate the impact of a growing community of Italian immigrants in exile (in London) on established historical paradigms of Italian culture, which he claims were 'contested' after 1815, as writers such as Hunt, Foscolo and Shelley began to uncover more 'nuanced' and modern conceptualizations of Italy. He discusses the contempt for contemporary Italians in the prevailing British social discourse of the period, including the term 'macaroni', a term used to mock 'cosmopolitan men who had a penchant for ornate Italian textiles and fashions'. The author here compellingly positions the aesthetic and political contributions of members of the Italian diaspora such as Mozart's librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte, and Augustus Bozzi as well as the British scholar/translator Thomas Mathias, to construct an alternative narrative of Italy which countered the 'insularity' of the Lakers and infused fresh blood into the radicalism of Byron and Shelley. Although Edward Said's definition of nationalism is used to identify British insularity in Wordsworth and Southey, the author doesn't complicate the alternative nationalist narratives that he is talking about here – there seems to be an assumption that these are somehow more 'authentic'. At the end of the chapter, Bowers contends that 'Italian life and ideas […] offered a new freedom […] of being at liberty to question state-promoted forms, genres, themes, and even the nation itself ', yet it is not quite clear how the 'nation itself ' is being questioned by the writers discussed here. The ideological underpinnings of the Italian Risorgimento, even in its early stages, were quite complex and in many ways, problematic, in terms of the framing of national identity, state sovereignty and power; this dimension seems to be absent from the discussion of nationalism in this chapter and the book in general.

A consideration of this complexity would have benefited the discussion of Hunt's The Story of Rimini and Byron's Parisina in Chapter 2, where the author argues quite persuasively for the influence of Rimini on Parisina and describes both works as subverting the 'nationalist and conservative romance' established by Scott. However, though there is close attention given to Hunt's reading of Dante, the political implications of 'internal conflict' and 'civil disorder' in these works are not teased out; Bowers...