In the last decades of the eighteenth century, Voltaire sparked off a fierce debate on the merits and demerits of Shakespeare’s plays, to which Baretti responded with his Discours sur Shakespeare et sur M. de Voltaire. Defending the English playwright against the charges brought against him by the French philosopher, Baretti framed what would be a fundamental tension in the transition from the Age of Enlightenment to the Romantic Age: the question of universalism, understood in terms of the opposition between “universal taste” and “national genius”. In an argument remarkable for its profundity and breadth of reference, Baretti raises issues that are still topical today, such as the process of globalization and the desire to overcome cultural boundaries and achieve a homogenization of aesthetic taste, bringing a new urgency to the dialectic between the universal and the particular.
University of Udine, Italy - ORCID: 0009-0007-2930-8075
Titolo del capitolo
Genio nazionale versus gusto universale. Baretti interprete e apologeta di Shakespeare nella polemica contro Voltaire
Autori
Eleonora Gallitelli
Lingua
Italian
DOI
10.36253/979-12-215-0448-4.08
Opera sottoposta a peer review
Anno di pubblicazione
2024
Copyright
© 2024 Author(s)
Licenza d'uso
Licenza dei metadati
Titolo del libro
Baretti’s England
Sottotitolo del libro
Figure e momenti del Settecento anglo-italiano
Curatori
Elisa Bianco, Alessandra Vicentini
Opera sottoposta a peer review
Numero di pagine
200
Anno di pubblicazione
2024
Copyright
© 2024 Author(s)
Licenza d'uso
Licenza dei metadati
Editore
Firenze University Press
DOI
10.36253/979-12-215-0448-4
ISBN Print
979-12-215-0447-7
eISBN (pdf)
979-12-215-0448-4
eISBN (epub)
979-12-215-0449-1
Collana
Biblioteca di storia
ISSN della collana
2464-9007
e-ISSN della collana
2704-5986