Ugo Foscolo and English Culture

The history of the literary relations between Italy and England has its most celebrated early modern representative in Ugo Foscolo (1778-1827). Foscolo's translation of Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy is often regarded as the benchmark of his English experience but there is more - around and beyond his relationship with Sterne - that can be uncovered. With over 3000 letters spanning three decades Foscolo's correspondence represents a unique perspective from which to monitor his literary philosophical and political views. The 'Epistolario' is also a space in which Foscolo engages with literary philosophical and moral questions and a place where he exercises an often private form of literary criticism. These are letters which ultimately produce one of the most complete yet most composite self-portraits in the history of modern Italian autobiography. In the first comprehensive and historicized reading of Foscolo's correspondence Sandra Parmegiani reveals the rich and complex relations between the Italian writer and the literature philosophy and culture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England.