The Victorians and Italy: Literature, Travel, Politics and Art

This volume contains a selection of papers presented at the Dickens, Victorian Culture and Italy conference hosted in June 2007 by the University of Genoa, with the support of the University of Milan and of Saint Louis University - Madrid Campus. The collection features research into the perception of Italy and the reception of Italian culture by English writers, and, more marginally, on the reception of Victorian writers in Italy. In their response to Italy, the Victorians inevitably reacted to constructions of Italy they inherited from eighteenth-century pastoral, Gothic fiction, and Romantic poetry, onto which they grafted their own specific aesthetic, moral and political concerns, as well as their reactions to contemporary Italy. The essays included in this volume show that as a land of political restlessness, torn between its modernising tendencies and its allegiance to the past, Italy became an ideal mirror where the problems of Victorian self-representation could be projected and displaced. Thus, in tracing a variety of responses to Italy (as picturesque or not, as politically unstable, as an inspiration, alternative or other), this collection invites the reader to reconsider the role of Italy in the Victorian imagination, offering new highlights on the fecund and complex relationship between English and Italian literatures, English culture and Italian Risorgimento, Roman Catholicism, Italian history and art.