Petrarch in Romantic England

The Petrarchan revival in Romantic England was a unique phenomenon which involved an impressive number of scholars, translators and poets. It had no counterpart in any other European nation and it can be compared only to the Petrarchan fashion of the Renaissance. Its effects on poetry, fiction and scholarship were manifold and made themselves felt well into the Victorian age. This book is the first study of the way Petrarch was read and rewritten, in prose and verse, by figures such as Thomas Gray, Sir William Jones, Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, and the major Romantics from Wordsworth and Coleridge to Shelley, Keats, L.E.L. and Madame de Stael. Petrarch was the main driving force behind the revival of the sonnet and love poetry in the Romantic age, and he must be considered, more than Sappho and Dante, as a primary source of the lyric poetry of our time. CONTENTS: Introduction; 1) Writing the Biography of Petrarch: From Susanna Dobson (1775) to the Romantics; 2) Englishing Petrarch: The Translators' Role; 3) Charlotte Smith and Anna Seward; 4) The Della Cruscans and Mary Robinson; 5) Charles Lloyd and Samuel Taylor Coleridge; 6) Epilogue: From Romantic to Victorian Petrarch; 7) Notes; 8) Bibliography; 9) Index.