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'Classicism and Romanticism in Italian Literature: Leopardi's Discourse on Romantic Poetry'

Fabio Camilletti (Dept of Italian)

The ‘Discourse of an Italian on Romantic Poetry’ is a literary manifesto written in 1818 by the twenty-year old philologist, philosopher and poet Giacomo Leopardi, which remained however unpublished since the early twentieth-century. Inspired by the quarrel between Classicists and Romantics that was engulfing post-Napoleonic Italy, Leopardi’s ‘Discourse’ articulates an original and thought-provoking reflection on the possibility itself of making literature in modern times, rejecting both the Classicist’s precepts of sterile imitation and the Romantics’ yearning for absolute newness in terms of themes and formal choices. Fabio Camilletti’s Classicism and Romanticism in Italian Literature takes Leopardi’s ‘Discourse’ as a starting point for reflecting on the Classicist-Romantic quarrel as a field of tension in post-revolutionary Italy, and for reconfiguring a critical analysis of Leopardi’s though in a quintessentially comparative perspective. Enriched by the first complete translation of the ‘Discourse’ by Gabrielle Sims (New York University), the book aims to be a reference work for all scholars interested in Romantic literature as a trans-national phenomenon.