Romantic 'dantism,' travel, visions and exile : Byron, Ugo Foscolo and Henry Francis Cary

Abstract

It may seem incongruous to introduce an essay on Romantic Dantism with an epigraph from a twenty-first century collection of essays by Susan Sontag, but the relevance of her words should soon become clear. Sontag's concern is with population movements across cultural, geographical or political borders, and with forms of self-knowledge that develop out of exile and strangeness. She traces how displacement can give rise to anxieties based on fissures in intercultural understanding, exploring how those anxieties in tum distort channels of communication. The essence of her argument transcends any discreet specificity of time and connects with concerns confronted by Romantic writers, two hundred years earlier. Human beings attempt to understand what is obscure through reference to what is familiar, identifying with what appears to be consistent with their own values and displacing that which threatens those values. [excerpt]