Interventions on contemporary Italian literature
Essays on the present literature in Italy was written between March and April 1818 on request by John Hobhouse, an influential English politician and close friend of George Byron, who Foscolo had met via Lord Holland. Hobhouse was preparing publication of a volume of illustrative notes that were meant to accompany an edition of the fourth canto of Byron's Childe Harold, which came out of London's John Murray in 1818; he asked Foscolo to prepare the part on contemporary Italian literature, which was quickly written in Italian, translated into English and published as Hobhouse's work in Historical Illustrations of the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold. Foscolo paternity of the essay, however, was totally acknowledged almost immediately.
Foscolo addressed the English public clearly and lucidly and provided critical portraits of contemporary writers, including Parini, Alfieri and Monti. He then expressed a reductive judgement on the Classics-Romantics polemic, highlighting an excess of theorization.
Meanwhile, an article entitled Italian Periodical Literature published in the “European Review” in 1824 was devoted to journalism; in this Foscolo reviewed Italian periodicals from the 16th century; among the preferred contemporary periodicals was Florence's “Antologia”, while he expressed a negative opinion of “Conciliatore”, an expression of Milanese Romanticism accused of offering more space to theoretical dissertations than to providing "works of imagination". Foscolo also criticized the practice of contemporary literary figures of accompanying their works with poetic writings in the incomplete and never published Della nuova scuola drammatica italiana (Of the new Italian drama school). While reviewing the Dramatic works of Manzoni, he dwelt on the issue of the relationship between history and poetry, which should have profoundly different functions, and he opposed the idea forwarded by Manzoni by sustaining that it is not the poet's job to be a historian, but to combine truth and imagination in a profound unit in his work.
