Translating Italy for the Nineteenth century: Translators and an Imagined Nation in the Early Romantic Period 1816-1830

The profound transformation that a cultural system aiming to be recognised as “Italian’ ” underwent with the advent of the Romantic Movement serves as a pretext, rather than a “text”, for this volume. By this I mean that this study is not intended to be part of Italian Studies on the one hand or Cultural Studies on the other, focusing on the influence of British literature on Italian culture. Rather, the “Italian” culture of the first decades of the nineteenth century provides the context for a study of translation as a fundamental practice for the renovation of a given cultural system during an important phase of its evolution. In this work I would like to present an account of how translation became a means of introducing the “foreign” (an English and contemporary foreign) to produce a renewal of the Italian literary system in the early nineteenth century. A Translation Studies perspective will therefore allow me to concentrate on the foreign, rather than the indigenous, traits of Italian literature and culture and see how, by means of translation difference, it became one of the constitutive elements of new definitions of Italian literary identity.