European Literatures in Britain, 1815–1832: Romantic Translations

Sheds new light on the presence and impact of Continental European literary traditions in post-Napoleonic Britain.

This book offers an original approach to the presence of Continental European literatures in post-Napoleonic Britain. In doing so it reconstructs a literary and cultural environment in which patriotic discourse - the expression of a triumphant international power - combined with intensely transformative engagements with foreign literary traditions.Studies of British Romanticism have traditionally tended to envisage it as an intensely local, indeed insular, phenomenon. Yet, just as the seemingly isolated British Isles became more and more central in international geo-political and economic contexts between the 1780s and the 1830s, so too literature and culture were characterized by an increasingly close and relevant dialogue with foreign and especially Continental European traditions, both past and contemporary. Diego Saglia casts new light on the significantly transformative impact of this dialogue on Britain during the years that saw a return to unimpeded cross-border cultural traffic after the end of the Napoleonic emergency. Focusing on modes of translation and appropriation in a variety of literary and cultural forms, this book reconsiders the notion of the supposed intrinsic insularity of Britain through the lens of new key questions about the national, international and transnational features of Romantic-period literature and culture.