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The Genesis of an Italian Style
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 December 2019
Leigh Hunt was the first of the second generation to be formally and thematically influenced by Italy, and the majority of this chapter is an examination of his Italian romance The Story of Rimini. Hunt’s poem is a 1,700 line prequel to Dante’s encounter with Paolo and Francesca, narrated over some seventy lines of Inferno V.2 Timothy Webb has recently claimed that Rimini ‘might very reasonably be recognised as one of the more significant narrative poems of the Romantic period but it has not yet been accorded the status it deserves, either as cultural phenomenon or literary text’.3 This chapter aims to right this wrong, and to view Hunt, as Byron did, as a man at ‘the centre of circles’, specifically someone at the vanguard of romantic engagement with Italian literature and versification.4 Byron’s (sadly) neglected romance Parisina was written in the same period, and was influenced by Rimini.5 It is an influence about which criticism is relatively quiet, preferring instead to devote time to Byron’s ‘Turkish’ tales (1813–1816) and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–1818).
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