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Manzoni and Leopardi—Kenelm Foster's Interpretation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Michael Caesar
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Extract

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To a former student like myself, to whom Kenelm’s conversation about the Italian Ottocento was as stimulating over the years as his teaching on the subject had been sure and authoritative in undergraduate and postgraduate days, it was always something of a shock to remember how relatively little he had published in this area of Italian literature. Two major essays, both of which started life as lectures, two invaluable translations, a scattering of lesser articles and reviews—these, combined with his presence as teacher and talker, were enough to ensure his status as an indispensable point of reference in any discussion of the early nineteenth century in Italy.

The two lecture-essays—on the idea of truth in Manzoni and Leopardi (1967) and in commemoration of Manzoni on the centenary of his death (1973)—are not so much the report of specific pieces of research as syntheses, dense and sometimes tense, of what Kenelm judged to be the most important things he had to say about the subject. And the subject mattered to him a lot. Manzoni was important because, as he put it in the centenary lecture, he was ‘that uncommon thing, a considerable Christian artist’—adding in pen to his own copy the word ‘very’ before ‘considerable’—and Leopardi was in some sense his antithesis. What Kenelm had in mind when he thought about Christian art is discussed elsewhere in this issue.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 67 , Issue 798 , October 1986 , pp. 432 - 435
Copyright
Copyright © 1986 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 The writings discussed or alluded to in this article are the following: ‘Blasphemous Poets’ (Carducci, Leopardi, Baudelaire), in Blackfriars XXXIV, 402, Sept. 1953, 394–403; ‘Manzoni and the Italians’, now in God's Tree, London, Blackfriars Publications, 1957, 85–92Google Scholar; ‘The Idea of Truth in Manzoni and Leopardi’ (British Academy Italian Lecture 1967)Google Scholar, in Proceedings of the British Academy LIII, 243–257; ‘Alessandro Manzoni (1785–1873)’ (lecture delivered at Cambridge University, March 1973), in Italian Quarterly XVII (1974), 67, 7–23; Manzoni, A., The Column of Infamy, tr. K.F., London, O.U.P., 1964Google Scholar; Manzoni, A., “‘Pentecost” and other Poems’, tr. K.F., in Comparative Criticism. A Year Book, vol. 3, Cambridge, C.U.P., 1981, 199–205Google Scholar. In the early and mid‐fifties, Kenelm devoted some study to religious thought in nineteenth‐century Italy, especially to that of Antonio Rosmini, the centenary of whose death fell in 1955. See: ‘Rosmini in 1848—'49’ (1955). now in God's Tree cit., 93–101; ‘Burke, Rosmini and the Revolution’, in Blackfriars XXXVIII, 447, June 1957. 256–260Google Scholar.