"The Petrarchian revival in Romantic England was a unique phenomenon which involved an impressive number of scholars, translators, and poets. It had no counterpart in any other European nation and it can be compared only to the Petrarchan fashion of the Renaissance. Its effects on poetry, fiction and scholarship were manifold and made themselves felt well into the Victorian age. This book is the first study of the way Petrarch was read and rewritten, in prose and verse, by figures such as Thomas Gray, Sir William Jones, Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, and the major Romantics from Wordsworth and Coleridge to Shelley, Keats, L.E.L. and Madame de Stael."--Jacket.