Petrarch in Romantic England by Edoardo Zuccato

Abstract

822 Reviews Jose Ricardo Chaves, 'Romanticism, Occultism and the Fantastic in Spain and Latin America'. Takayuki Yokota-Murakami provides a perspective from Japan, 'Romantic Prose Fiction in Modern Japan: Finding an Expression against theGrain', and A. Owen Aldridge also presents a thoroughly international comparison in 'Ludic Prose from Laurence Stern to Carlos Fuentes'. The impact of Romantic prose fiction on subsequent movements and media is explored in Jeanne J.Smoot, 'Romantic Thought and Style in 19th Century Realism and Naturalism', JoelBlack, 'Romantic Legacies in Fin-de-siecle and Early 20th Century Fiction', and Elaine Martin, 'Rewrites and Remakes: Screen Adaptations ofRomantic Works'. There is always a riskwith any volume of this nature?one which aims to cover such a broad range ofmaterial, themes, and cultures?that key aspects will remain underexplored or even overlooked. The editors of this volume are to be compli mented, therefore, on the comprehensive nature and quality of the studies they include. The impressive range of contributors is testimony in itselfto the standard of scholarship on show,with some of the leading names in the field featuring promi nently. There is also a notably international array of contributors, something crucial to but often absent from such volumes which claim comprehensive coverage and a comparative approach. In choosing such an array, the editors have managed to ne gotiate thepotential pitfalls surrounding such comparative works, which perversely often fail to represent a trulybroad range of approaches and cultural diversities. The volume ends with a full listing of the contents of all five volumes in the subseries. The range ofmaterial covered is impressive and, even at a glance, it is clear what a mammoth undertaking this has been. The current volume isvaluable in itselfbut, seen in the context of the entire subseries, itbecomes clear that the editors have created an invaluable critical resource which would greatly enhance any scholarly library. Bangor University Carol Tully Petrarch in Romantic England. By Edoardo Zuccato. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2008. xiv+241 pp. ?50. ISBN 978-0-230-54260-0. 'Petrarch in Romantic England? Surely thatmust be a misprint for Renaissance England', says Edoardo Zuccato in the introduction to his book: 'Few readers, or even scholars, would think of Romanticism as a Petrarchan age. And theywould be right for every European country except England. The Petrarchan revival in late eighteenth-century England was a unique phenomenon' (p. iv). He does not elaborate on the uniqueness' of English Romantic Petrarchism, which perhaps needs a few words of qualification, but he does provide ample evidence of the extent and significance of thewave of interest in Petrarch at this time inminor and major writers alike?especially women writers, Charlotte Smith, Anna Seward, and Mary Robinson prominent among them. And among themajor poets he devotes substantial sections toColeridge above all, but also to Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, all ofwhom, in one way or another, could not avoid some response to the contemporary interest in the Italian poet. MLR, 104.3, 2009 823 Two main themes emerge. The first is the interest inPetrarch's lifeand the nature of his relationship with Laura, provoked initially by theAbbe de Sade's Memoires pour la vie de Francois Retrarque (1764) and the abridged English translation published by Susanna Dobson in 1775. Sade's insistence that Laura was married to an ancestor ofhis towhom she bore eleven children came as a shock tomany English admirers of the poet, who objected to this carnal' Petrarch and the implication of adultery. Dobson toned down the intensity of Petrarch's passion for Laura, not sharing Sade's view that even a virgin could read Petrarch without blushing. Zuccato makes a good case for his major contention that the Canzoniere was received by English readers of the period essentially like a novel of sensibility?and that this was the secret of Petrarch's popularity, particularly with the female public. Against this themore robustmale readers reacted, notably Byron, who at one point spoke of Petrarch as a 'metaphysical whining dotard': 'Think you ifLaura had been Petrarch's wife I He would have written sonnets all his life?'.At the same time Byron, following Sismondi and Foscolo, criticized Petrarch's political stance, setting his readiness to compromise with...