Byron and Italy tackles a subject to which no book has been devoted exclusively since the early 1940s. Peter Cochran writes not just about Byron’s relationships with Italian literature, not just about his relationships with Italian women, and not just about his relationship with Italian politics. He writes about Byron’s relationship with Italy as a whole, seeing the poet’s sojourn in Italy as a vain attempt to forge a new identity for himself. Drawing on a wide range of up-to-date research, including his own as editor of Teresa Guiccioli’s Lord Byron’s Life in Italy and the diary of John Cam Hobhouse, Cochran traces numerous threads of evidence showing how the critical reception Byron’s poetry received from Italian critics gave him a new sense of self-worth, and how his experience of Italian Carnival, and of the Italian mock-heroic tradition in verse, gave him a new idea of who he was, and of what poetry was about.Among much else, the book includes new material on the Carbonari and on Byron’s reading of Ugo Foscolo, and an appendix containing translations of all known Italian and Austrian police-reports on Byron and his entourage.
