Moderna | 2018 | N. 1-2

In cultural history there are problematic notions either quickly abandoned, or, on the contrary, providing endless analytical response and consequent debate. The Italian Restoration after the Napoleonic Age is such a notion, and, indeed, a pivotal one in the definition and interpretation of Europe’s quickly changing cultural landscape involving aesthetics, symbols, the perception of oneself and others. The new conceptual frame was provided by Romanticism ideologically and esthetically shaping a new idea of Nation in a new idealized conception of history, fitting the needs of centralization, control, homogeneity of the liberal state shaped by the nationalistic trend urged by the rising power of the bourgeoisie.

This essay intends to explore the connections between Idealism and Romanticism in Germany and Italy. Wilhelm Dilthey’s frequent intersections combining philosophy, literature and poetry in the interpretation of Romanticism will be analysed in the perspective offered by Dilthey’s historicism in the dynamic context of the various development phases of historicism in Germany, and of the political stand points of Idealism. The Italian situation will be taken into consideration in cauda, focusing on its specific differences, as well as on its contact points with the German and European political and ideological scene.

This essay aims to highlight the spirit of modernity permeating Melchiorre Cesarotti’s works. Modernity can be evinced in his important translations as well as in his participation to the debate on the renewal of the Italian language as well as in his stance in favour of a cultural attitude trying to capture the linguistic pulse of Modernity thus rejuvenating old formulas anchored to tradition.

Alfieri is the Italian writer reflecting more than any other the tensions and conflicts marking the transition from the Enlightenment to Romanticism. The complex, often contradictory coexistence of a still active legacy of the Enlightenment together with the tensions characterizing the imminence of Romanticism is manifested with great emphasis in Alfieri’s two treatises, Della tirannide and Del Principe e delle lettere, both hovering between the conceptual foundations of the Enlightenment and a poetics of the sublime and ‘forte sentire’, characterized by fully romantic traits such as a religion of freedom, Titanism, individualism, and patriotism.

This essay is meant to revisit the relationships between some protagonists of the nascent Italian Romanticism and Ugo Foscolo who was one of the best known Italian authors of his time, recognized as a maestro and a guide by the younger writers in their literary novitiate. This led to an open misunderstanding not only due to strictly literary reasons, but also to the political and cultural rift determined by the new early Risorgimento ideological bent. Neither conciliation nor active collaboration was possible between Foscolo, an exile in England, detached from the Italian early Restoration cultural and political situation, and the new romantic writers fully involved in their strong militant engagement against the most committed and determined classicists. The present essay will deal with Foscolo’s most significant writings among those he published on this matter in the major English magazines.

Madame De Staël had a central role in the debate on modern Italian literature. By comparing its characterizing aspects with the intellectual needs of the new audience, she brought into full light the limits of a worn-out tradition. The main flaws were the old emphasis on style and empty rhetoric against De Staël’s insistence on the primacy of ideas, and the relevance of issues characterizing European tradition. Yet, while indicting the emptiness of modern Italian literature under the weight of its rhetorical tradition, Madame De Staël also found in the great Italian tradition the certainty of its future in the history of culture.

This essay analyzes the connection between language and literature in Ludovico di Breme’s works. According to di Breme, language and literature are deeply connected as a result of the moral importance of intellectual work in human society. Di Breme appreciated Eyraud’s studies on deaf-and-dumb language, because he was interested in finding universal laws of grammar and mental structures. Di Breme thought intellectuals had a civilization duty towards society. He joined the romantic movement as a natural consequence of his ideas about the civil role of writing. Di Breme wrote the Grand Commentaire in order to organize a plan of cooperation between intellectuals and the State, or rather between culture and society. Di Breme set up « Il Conciliatore » as a tool meant to unify the political ideas of the intellectuals and to coordinate their action in society. In the years to come, however, the new intellectuals writing on «Il Conciliatore» abandoned Di Breme’s project, and focused their attention on technology and science.

Often considered as the weakest link in the chain of the 1816 romantic manifestoes, the Avventure letterarie di un giorno by Pietro Borsieri plays a central role when discussing the themes of cultural renewal : literary genres, journalism, relationship between innovation and tradition. This essay identifies the connections with the Introduzione to the « Biblioteca italiana », written by Borsieri at the end of 1815 (yet then unpublished); a few months later, the author was to develop a number of issues of the controversy in Pamphlet, which was also intented as an example of modern narrative prose.

Berchet’s Lettera semiseria di Grisostomo al suo figliuolo is seen in its relationship with eighteenth-century tradition and its dialogue with contemporary authors, especially with M.me de Stäel, Di Breme, Borsieri, Leopardi.

This essay analyzes Idee elementari sulla poesia romantica and Dialogo sulle unità drammatiche di tempo e di luogo, two articles by Ermes Visconti published on «Il Conciliatore» in 1818-1819. It discusses the genesis and network of relationships, the dialogic interaction with Manzoni, the resumption of positions by August Schlegel, their critical fortune: from the consent of foreign intellectuals (Fauriel, Goethe, Stendhal), to Borgese’s apodictic devaluation, and more recent revaluations. Particular attention is given to the innovative positions of Visconti such as his look at literature in a systemic dimension, seen as «inherent to the social status of a people», in its relationships with society and ideas, and in an European perspective.

This essay intends to show the editorial policy adopted by «Il Conciliatore» in accordance with its romantic poetics. The idea was the publishing of serious essays together with ironic tales, short stories, apologues, anecdotes. The main target was a new audience of middlebrow people and women, above all, which explains a certain propensity for the sentimental novel. The editors as well as the contributors to «Il Conciliatore» saw a close connection between literature and society. In its European perspective «Il Conciliatore» meant to spread civil virtues in a plain and easy style in contrast with the linguistic choices of Classicism and of the Vocabulary of the Crusca.

In the Discorso di un Italiano intorno alla poesia romantica (1818) the discovery of the ‘prosaic’ order of the modern world is not enough to authorise new aesthetic paradigms going beyond classicism and to question the imaginative poetry of the ancients. Leopardi still considers such poetry the term of comparison for authentic poetry, capable of restoring an intense, vital relationship with nature. The ‘shift from the old condition to the modern one’ occurs in 1819 – just one year after the Discorso – and leads to a new kind of poetry, namely that of the Canti. With their ‘philosophical’ or ‘sentimental’ character, the Canti annex the territory of truth, which is the domain of prose. At the same time, far from being cancelled, the inventive, imaginative force of poetry is called for and in a way strengthened by such language of ‘truth’.

The positive principle of Manzoni’s esthetic reflections on Romanticism is the compliance of art and the ‘real’, together with the identification of such ‘real’ with a Christian ‘real’ as the answer to the modern man’s infinity anxiety and permanent awareness of human imperfection. As an ideal disciple of Schlegel, Manzoni, in constant dialogue with his friends, Visconti and Fauriel, also defines his Romanticism as the refusal of allegory and mythological fables, as well as of any idea of the a priori superiority of ancient writers, in a radical criticism of literary rules starting from Aristotle’s poetics. Such principles shaped Manzoni’s romantic poetics between 1816 and 1817; his theoretical itinerary, however, was marked by constant reticence and the refusal of any direct involvement in literary controversy, being Manzoni rather oriented towards a progressive inclusion of the classics in the universal canon of Romantic Literature.

Recent studies on Vincenzo Monti’s biography and writings open a new and more verifiable research field apropos the authentic meaning and nature of Monti’s ideological position in the cultural and political history of his time. Abandoning nineteenth and twentieth centuries outdated points of view, Monti’s ideological posture must be reconsidered.

Recent studies reconsider some determined aspects of the Romantic movement in Sicily. In that light this essay intends to revisit all the intellectuals involved in the so-called dispute between the Classicists and the Romantics, also taking into consideration their connections with contemporary Italian and European writers. The Sicilian debate on Romanticism developed between 1821 and 1845 through reviews, treatises, theatrical texts, and the prefaces to the Italian translations of Scott’s novels. The main centers of the Romantic movement in Sicily will also be taken into consideration together with the recurrence of the main Romantic themes, genres, and the common refusal of pseudo-Aristotelian rules in drama.

This essay intends to shed new light on the relationships between early nineteenth-century southern Italian culture and no merely formal, indeed very intense late Enlightenment cultural experiences such as Gaetano Filangieri’s, Mario Pagano’s, Francesco Selfi’s. In this perspective the present essay also intends to highlight the influence, and the effects exercised by Bonapartist social-political directives in Southern Italy.

This essay aims at producing a new reading of the ideological general text of Romanticism in order to redefine its social, civil, and political value system. A special relevance will be given to textual practices such as the mixing together of traditional genres (lyrical poetry, narrative, drama) with the result of a code renewal functional to the shaping of a non-elitist national discourse also addressed to the ‘popular audience’. The compromising nature of Italian Romanticism was counterbalanced by its social and esthetic intent, in search of an innovative language. Both pre-Manzoni and post-Manzoni romantic writers produced a new intellectual and syntactic style strongly influencing the evolution of the Italian language.

A bibliographic review of works on Italian Romanticism published between 2004 and 2015.