The Italian author Ugo Foscolo (1778-1827) was a poet, critic, and dramatist as well as a patriot. His romantic temperament and flamboyant life characterize his role as a key transitional figure in Italian literary history. Born Niccolò Foscolo...

Ugo Foscolo's vision of Europe was affected by his aesthetic views and can be seen in his artistic expressions of the sublime and the comic. His vision of the sublime owes much to Longinus' treatise 'On the Sublime,' which Foscolo admired greatly. Possible influences...

Melchiorre Cesarotti expanded the bounds of Italian poetry with his translation and recreation of Thomas Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.' The impact of this translation on Italian poetry was great and cannot be overlooked in Ugo Foscolo's first novel 'Ultime lettere di...

In the following essay, Cambon compares and contrasts Foscolo's Letters of Ortis with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's thematically similar The Sorrows of Young Werther. The critic also discusses the input provided by the Countess Antonietta Fagnani Arese, who had translated Goethe's work, and with whom Foscolo was in love.

In the following essay, Cambon explains how Foscolo's increasing distance from his original homeland of Greece created a strong mythos in his poetry that reflects not just nostalgia but an urge to transcend the present.

In the following essay, Radcliff-Umstead traces the various evolutionary stages of Foscolo's unfinished poem The Graces, and discusses how the fragments illustrate the poet's views on artistic expression and contemporary events and figures, as well as how it fuses modern and mythic elements.