With the rise of mass tourism, Italy became increasingly accessible to Victorian women travellers not only as a locus of artistic culture but also as a site of political enquiry. Despite being outwardly denied a political voice in Britain, many female tourists were conspicuous in their commitment to the Italian campaign for national independence, or Risorgimento (1815–61). Revisiting Italy brings several previously unexamined travel accounts by women to light during a decisive period in this political campaign. Revealing the wider currency of the Risorgimento in British literature, Butler situates once-popular but now-marginalized writers: Clotilda Stisted, Janet Robertson, Mary Pasqualino, Selina Bunbury, Margaret Dunbar and Frances Minto Elliot alongside more prominent figures: the Shelley-Byron circle, the Brownings, Florence Nightingale and the Kemble sisters. Going beyond the travel book, she analyses a variety of forms of travel writing including unpublished letters, privately printed accounts and periodical serials. Revisiting Italy focuses on the convergence of political advocacy, gender ideologies, national identity and literary authority in women’s travel writing. Whether promoting nationalism through a maternal lens, politicizing the pilgrimage motif or reviving gothic representations of a revolutionary Italy, it identifies shared touristic discourses as temporally contingent, shaped by commercial pressures and the volatile political climate at home and abroad.

Revisiting Shakespeare’s Italian Resources is about the complex dynamics of transmission and transformation of the Italian sources of twelve Shakespearean plays, from The Two Gentlemen of Verona to Cymbeline. It focuses on the works of Sir Giovanni Fiorentino, Da Porto, Bandello, Ariosto, Dolce, Pasqualigo, and Groto, as well as on commedia dell’arte practices. This book discusses hitherto unexamined materials and revises received interpretations, disclosing the relevance of memorial processes within the broad field of intertextuality vis-à-vis conscious reuses and intentional practices.

A study of the lure of Italy in German culture from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Wearied by his life as an administrator at the Duke’s court in Weimar, in 1786 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe departed unannounced in the middle of the night for what had been the destination of his imagination since childhood: Italy. His extended stay there dramatically affected his views of art, architecture, prose, poetry, and science. When he returned to Germany and Weimar, Goethe’s experiences translated into his life and work in ways that influenced countless others as they developed Germany’s own brand of high culture. The Spell of Italy: Vacation, Magic, and the Attraction of Goethe tracks the peculiar space Italy occupies in the cultural consciousness of German writers by reconsidering the Italian journeys of Goethe and Winckelmann and the legacy of those journeys in the works of Heine, Nietzsche, Freud, Mann, Carossa, and Bachmann. Author Richard Block contests previous assumptions about Italy as a place to encounter classical culture and creative rebirth. His study examines the degree to which Germany’s literary and cultural traditions appropriated a phantasmic Italy, showing how Winckelmann’s art history and Goethe’s Italian journey predisposed later writers to search for an aesthetic ideal in Italy that did not exist, and how their search for this absent ideal eventually resulted in disillusionment and deception. Building on previous work on Goethe, literary theory, and cultural history, The Spell of Italy offers compelling new ways of understanding Germany’s fascination with Italy from the eighteenth century to its troubled political history of the twentieth century.

Until the beginning of the 18th century, to be 'Italian' meant to identify with a number of collective memories, rather than a national memory. Yet there are elements of continuity that have shaped Italian identity over the past 1,500 years. Religion, food, art and architecture, a literary language, as well as a particular relationship between cities and countryside, between family and civil society have all contributed to present day Italian culture and politics. Baldoli explores the history of Italy as a country, rather than as a nation, in order to trace its fascinating cultural and political development. Offering a way into each period of Italian history, the book brings Italy's past to life with extracts from poetry, novels and music. Drawing on the latest research published in English and Italian, this is the ideal introduction for all those interested in Italy's cultural and social past and its significance for the country's present.

In 1918 , a one-month stint with the American Red Cross ambulance corps at the Italian front marked the beginning of Ernest Hemingway’s fascination with Italy—a place second only to Upper Michigan in stimulating his lifelong passion for geography and local expertise. Hemingway’s Italy offers a thorough reassessment of Italy’s importance in the author’s life and work during World War I and the 1920s, when he emerged as a promising young writer, and during his maturity in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This collection of eighteen essays presents a broad view of Hemingway’s personal and literary response to Italy. The contributors, some of the most distinguished Hemingway scholars, incorporate new biographical and historical information as well as critical approaches ranging from formalist and structuralist theory to cultural and interdisciplinary explorations. Included are discussions of Italy’s psychological functioning in Hemingway’s life, the author’s correspondence with his father during the writing of A Farewell to Arms, his stylistic experimentation and characterization in that novel, his juxtaposition of the themes of love and war, and his take on Fascism in both his fiction and journalistic work. In addition, the essayists explore relevant contexts of period and place—such as the rise of Fascism, ethnic attitudes, and the cultural currents between Italy and the United States. A landmark study, Hemingway’s Italy brings long-overdue attention to this great writer’s international role as cultural ambassador. Contributors : Rena Sanderson, Nancy R. Comley, Kim Moreland, Steven Florczyk, Kirk Curnutt, Lawrence H. Martin, John Robert Bittner, Jeffrey A. Schwarz, J. Gerald Kennedy, H. R. Stoneback, Beverly Taylor, Ellen Andrews Knodt, Linda Wagner-Martin, Robert E. Fleming, Miriam B. Mandel, Joseph M. Flora, Margaret O’Shaughnessey, Stephen L. Tanner, Vita Fortunati

Bringing together the work of a ground-breaking group of scholars working on the Italian Risorgimento to consider how modern Italian national identity was first conceived and constructed politically, the book makes a timely contribution to current discussions about the role of patriotism and the nature of nationalism in present-day Italy.

The Mediterranean has always loomed large in the history and culture of Italy, and since the 1980s this relationship has been represented in ever more varied forms as both national and regional identities have evolved within a globalized context. This interdisciplinary volume puts Italian artists (writers, musicians, and filmmakers) and intellectuals (philosophers, sociologists, and political scientists) in conversation with each other to explore Italy's Mediterranean identity while questioning the boundaries between Self and Other, and between native and foreign bodies. By moving beyond nation-centric models of cultural and ethnic homogeneity based on myths of progress and rationality, these wide-ranging contributions fashion new ways of belonging that transcend the cultural, economic, religious, and social categories that have characterized post Cold War Italy and Europe.

‘Dickens and America’ has been amply studied, his no less important relationship to Italy much less so, despite his friend Forster's assertion that his long stay in Genoa represented ‘the turning-point of his career.’ This book, arising from a major conference held in Genoa in 2007, attempts to redress the balance, focusing primarily on Dickens's two major writings about Italy—the travel book Pictures from Italy of 1845, and Part Two of his great novel Little Dorrit of 1855–7. It falls into six sections: the first concerns Dickens's enjoyment of leisure for the first time in his life in Italy; the second, his response to the visual attractions of Italy, both natural and artistic; the third, his political stance about Italy in the period of the Risorgimento; the fourth, his preoccupation with death and decay in what he saw and experienced in Italy; the fifth, his representation of ‘Italianness’ in Little Dorrit and elsewhere; and the sixth, his relation to modern and contemporary writers about Italy. It thus aims to fill a vital gap in Dickens studies.