From Coppet to Milan: Romantic Circles at La Scala
- Submitting institution
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Cardiff Metropolitan University / Prifysgol Metropolitan Caerdydd
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- ENG005
- Type
- D - Journal article
- DOI
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- Title of journal
- The Wordsworth Circle
- Article number
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- First page
- 59-65
- Volume
- 48
- Issue
- 1
- ISSN
- 0043-8006
- Open access status
- Compliant
- Month of publication
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- Year of publication
- 2017
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Research process
This article argues for the significance of Germaine de Staël’s distinguished coterie of Romantic European intellectuals at her chateau of Coppet in Switzerland, to then focus on Milan - and in particular its main Opera House - not only as a hub of radical sentiments and nationalistic sympathies while the Austrians held the city under control, but also as a locus of literary and political friendships which can be interpreted as the result of a continuous allegiance to the Romantic sociability model.
Research insights
This article establishes that the literati of Milan exist not merely as distinct or solitary voices but rather as a self-consciously defined group with affinities to Holland House in London, ‘home’ of the nationalist in exile Ugo Foscolo, thus proposing the usefulness of a mode of international Romantic sociability. The aim of this study is thus, first, to highlight the dynamic and shifting mediations between, within, and outside these associations; and second to illuminate the ways in which the radical questions specifically raised by the salon around Ludovico di Breme in Milan – from the Classic-Romantic controversy to the Romantics’ émigré experience as part of a complex and qualitative attempt to explain the significance of cosmopolitanism - found new answers and forms of signification in the work of Romantic European writers as in The Diary of Dr John William Polidori 1816 – Relating to Byron, Shelley, etc. (1816), Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto IV (1818), Stendhal’s Rome, Naples and Florence (1817) and “Reminiscences of Lord Byron in Italy” (1830).
Dissemination
This article was first published in the international quarterly peer-reviewed journal The Wordsworth Circle (vol. 48, No. 1, Winter 2017, Boston University Press, now University of Chicago Press), one of the most prestigious journals in Romantic Studies.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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