The Italian Idea

Will Bowers is Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Thought at Queen Mary University of London. He has published widely on Leigh Hunt, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and Lord Byron in journals such as Essays in Criticism, Review of English Studies, and Romanticism on Net, and is the co-editor of Re-evaluating the Literary Coterie 1580–1830 (2016).

• 1. Italians and the 'public mind' before 1815; 2. The genesis of an Italian style; 3. Foscolo, Hobhouse, and Holland House; 4. Venice redefined; 5. An almost revolutionary queen; 6. Sailing in the wind's eye.

'As an ambitious and challenging reflection on the wider implications of the Anglo-Italian cultural interaction in the early nineteenth century, The Italian Idea makes a significant contribution to the field of Anglo-Italian studies and literary history. It exemplifies a new kind of intellectual and political awareness - more trans-European and less national - of the radical writers of the time. But the real strength of this study lies in the range of Bowers' erudition.' Maria Schoina, Review 19