1 Decline and Discovery
Notes 1 Decline and Discovery 1. Following Charlotte Hogsett’s feminist usage, I refer to Madame de Staël, as she is generally known, as Staël. See Hogsett, The Literary Existence of Germaine de Staël (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), xiv. 2. For Staël’s major role in the formation of European Romanticism, see John Claiborne Isbell, The Birth of a European Romanticism: Truth and Propaganda in Staël’s De l’Allemagne, 1810–1813 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), passim. 3. As this is not a philological study, I have cited Avriel Goldberger’s English trans- lation of Staël’s novel, which appeared as Corinne, or Italy (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987); references are given parenthetically within the text whenever convenient. I have also relied on Morroe Berger’s edition of Madame de Staël on Politics, Literature, and National Character (New York: Doubleday, 1964), which contains extensive excerpts from On Literature, Germany, and Considerations on the Principle Events of the French Revolution.All footnote references from Berger’s edition are accompanied by corresponding (and supplementary) citations from Vols. I, II, and III of the Slatkine reprint of Oeuvres complètes de Madame la Baronne de Staël-Holstein, published in Geneva in 1967 after the Paris edition of 1861. 4. A crucial exception to this rule is Giacomo Leopardi, Discorso sopra lo stato presente dei costumi degl‘italiani, ed. Mario Andrea Rigoni (Milan: Rizzoli, 1988). Written in 1824 although published only in 1906, Leopardi’s study is influenced by Staël’s treatment of the Italian character with which it agrees on several key points.
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