Ok, I finally managed to find a solution - though implementing it is going to be a royal pain. I was content enough with cool reader, when suddenly a new idea came to mind. You see, FBReader doesn't recognize any formatting done via the epub format. I knew that. But suddenly the thought that it may read the fb2 format differently came to mind.
So I converted one of my epubs to fb2 and voila! Success! Italics and bolds now show up where they should.
Except that after conversion the table of contents has become messed up, and chapter headings have been replaced with the more ambiguous "...".