Goethe
The name of the German writer (Frankfurt 1749–Weimar 1832) already appears in the Piano di Studi of 1796 among the recommendations of contemporary novels to read: "Novels Telemachus/Amalia/New Heloise [....][one could add] the old fairy tale writers to the novelists, Richardson, Arnaud, and Goethe” (“Romanzi Il Telemaco/Amalia/Nouvell’Heloise [....] ai romanzieri [si potrebbero aggiungere] gli antichi scrittori di favole, Richardson, Arnaud, e Goethe”). At the centre of Foscolo's relationship with Goethe is the question, widely debated since Ortis's first appearance, of the debt this novel owes to The sorrows of young Werther (Liepzig 1774; the first Italian translation was by Gaetano Grassi in 1781), which is undeniable in terms of the epistolary structure characterised by a single letter writer who becomes the sole protagonist and upon whom the whole of the reader's attention is focused. Foscolo himself took part in the debate in the Notizia Bibliografica (Bibliographic News) published in the appendix to the Zurich edition of Ortis of 1816, in which he underlined his novel's autobiographical inspiration and rejected any accusation of plagiarism of the German work, recognizing, however, the parallels between the two novels, especially those of a formal nature.
Foscolo sent Goethe a copy of the first part of Ortis printed with a dateline of Italy 1801 by the Mainardi publisher of Milan, accompanied by a letter in which he partially recognized, albeit in a dubitative way, a debt to Werther, while insisting on the autobiographic inspiration and the novel's demand for truth in a bid to avert any accusation of plagiarism.
During the years in England, Foscolo polemized with Goethe, who had praised Manzoni's Conte di Carmagnola; in the incomplete reviews of the tragedies of Manzoni (1825-1826), collected under the title of Della nuova scuola drammatica italiana (Of the new Italian drama school), Foscolo systematically confuted the judgement of Goethe, who had assessed Manzoni's tragedy within the Romantic "system" and therefore exceeding in the process of theorization and abstraction that had impeded him from considering the work as an "individual object" (EN XI, Saggi di letteratura italiana Essays of Italian literature, 575) in its intrinsic qualities.
