Italy and the Irish romantics: Irish-Italian networks, narratives, and literary culture, 1785–1835

Thesis

This thesis is a study of the literary connections between Italy and Ireland in the fifty years spanning the publication of A Translation of the Inferno of Dante Alighieri by Henry Boyd in 1785, and the death of Margaret Mount Cashell in Pisa in 1835. I examine Italianism as an important cultural current in Irish Romanticism, which permeated all strata of Irish culture, from the eighteenth-century antiquarian tradition to the literary nationalism of the early to mid-nineteenth century. In this period, literary allusions to Italian texts, a proliferation of Irish-Italian comparisons, narratives, and fictional genealogies, and multifarious engagements with the Italian canon emerged as a fil conducteur in Irish writing, shifting Ireland’s cultural geography from the peripheries of the British Empire to the centre of Europe. The overarching methodology for my analysis involves following the diffusion of Italian ideas in Irish literary culture through the medium of coteries, in virtue of the circulation of manuscript material and radical ideas they fostered. Each of the five chapters focuses on a different circle in chronological order: the Moira House salon, the Holland House circle, the Casa Silva set, the Pisan circle, and the coterie, also active in Pisa, known as ‘Accademia dei Lunatici’. Alongside Boyd and Mount Cashell, the thesis considers a range of Irish and Anglo-Irish writers such as Joseph Cooper Walker, Charlotte Brooke, Lord Charlemont, Sydney Owenson, Katherine Wilmot, Maria Edgeworth, Thomas Moore, Mary Tighe, Sarah Curran, Caroline Lamb, Charles Robert Maturin, George William Tighe, and John Taaffe, who forged important literary links between Ireland and Italy, but whose engagement with Italian literature and ideas, and often their output altogether, have been largely overlooked. Although I blend bibliographical, historical, and close readings of both published and unpublished sources, my analysis focuses on the recovery of archival repositories of papers associated with the life of each circle listed above. Three key figures emerge from the matrix of these coteries and take centre stage in my study: Mount Cashell, G. W. Tighe, and Taaffe. Their unpublished works, correspondence, notebooks, commonplace books, and reading records are here examined for the first time, having come to light in the private libraries of their descendants.

Authors: Cozzi, E

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-bxpaw00nk
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: Italian, English
• Keywords: manuscript culture; European romanticism; literary coteries; Anglo-Italian studies; Irish romanticism
• Subjects: English