Italia Romantica

Italia Romantica
Author: Roderick Cavaliero
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2005-01-28
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 0857713892

Italia Romantica is a vivid history of the English Romantics' love affair with Italy and of the changing attitudes in pre-unification Italy. In the eyes of the English Romantics, Italy was not a nation but Italia, a place inhabited by the ancients. Theirs was a view shaped by the eighteenth century, the age of the Grand Tour, when no future nobleman's education was complete without a visit to Venice's carnival, the majestic ruins of the Forum in Rome, or the legendary Mount Vesuvius. The people of Italy, divided by language, region, and culture, did not share these artistic and historical ideals of Italia. After the Napoleonic wars all this was to change: Napoleon's march across Europe altered the map of Italy and brought an end to the Grand Tour in its previous form. Nationalism began to replace local loyalties and the land 'where the lemon trees blow' now attracted tourists. Through the eyes of Romantic travellers and poets such as Byron, Keats and Shelley, we see a fascinating picture of pre-unification Italy, struggling to recover after Napoleon and edging towards the Risorgimento. Here is the Italy of idealised antiquity, magnificent but crumbling, somewhat like a gigantic and rather run-down living museum. Roderick Cavaliero's compelling story is full of bandits, unreformed Catholicism, poets and improvisatory, shot through with vignettes of timeless urban and pastoral life, remarkable characters and anecdote, in this readable and strongly-etched cultural history.

The Formation of a National Audience in Italy, 1750–1890

The Formation of a National Audience in Italy, 1750–1890
Author: Gabriella Romani
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2017-06-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1611478014

The late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries witness significant advancement in the production and, crucially, the consumption of culture in Italy. During the long process towards and beyond Italy becoming a nation-state in 1861, new modes of writing and performing – the novel, the self-help manual, theatrical improvisation – develop in response to new practices and technologies of production and distribution. Key to the emergence of an inclusive national audience in Italy is, however, the audience itself. A wide and varied body of consumers of culture, animated by the notion of an Italian national cultural identity, create in this period an increasingly complex demand for different cultural products. This body is energized by the wider access to education and to the Italian language brought about by educational reforms, by growing urbanization, by enhanced social mobility, and by transcultural connections across European borders. This book investigates this process, analyzing the ways in which authors, composers, publishers, performers, journalists, and editors engage with the anxieties and aspirations of their diverse audiences. Fourteen essays by specialists in the field, exploring individual contexts and cases, demonstrate how interests related to gender, social class, cultural background and practices of reading and spectatorship, exert determining influence upon the production of culture in this period. They describe how women, men, and children from across the social and regional strata of the emerging nation contribute incrementally but actively to the idea and the growing reality of an Italian national cultural life. They show that from newspapers to salon performances, from letters to treatises in social science, from popular novels to literary criticism, from philosophical discussions to opera theaters, there is evidence in Italy in this period of unprecedented participation, crossing academic and popular cultures, in the formation of a national audience in Italy. This cultural transformation later produces the mass culture in Italy which underpins the major movements of the twentieth century and which undergoes new challenges and reformulations in the Italy we know today.

Romantic 'Anglo-Italians'

Romantic 'Anglo-Italians'
Author: Maria Schoina
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2016-12-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351902539

Focusing on key members of the Pisan Circle, Byron, the Shelleys, and Leigh Hunt, Maria Schoina explores configurations of identity and the acculturating practices of British expatriates in post-Napoleonic Italy. The problems involved in British Romanticism's relations to its European 'others' are her point of departure, as she argues that the emergence and mission of what Mary Shelley termed the 'Anglo-Italian' is inextricably linked to the social, political, economic, and cultural conditions of the age: the forging of the British identity in the midst of an expanding empire, the rise of the English middle class and the establishment of a competitive print culture, and the envisioning, by a group of male and female Romantic liberal intellectuals, of social and political reform. Schoina's emphasis on the political implications of the British Romantics' hyphenated self-representation results in fresh readings of the Pisan Circle's Italianate writings that move them away from interpretations focused on a purely aesthetic or poetic attachment to Italy to uncover their complex ideological underpinnings. Recognizing that Mary Shelley was instrumental in conceptualizing the Romantics' discourse of acculturation expands our understanding of this phenomenon, as does Schoina's convincing case for the importance of gender as a major determinant of Mary Shelley's construction of Anglo-Italianness.

APM - Archeologia Postmedievale, 19, 2015 - Gran Bretagna e Italia tra Mediterraneo e Atlantico: Livorno – ‘un porto inglese’ / Italy and Britain between Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds: Leghorn – ‘an English port’

APM - Archeologia Postmedievale, 19, 2015 - Gran Bretagna e Italia tra Mediterraneo e Atlantico: Livorno – ‘un porto inglese’ / Italy and Britain between Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds: Leghorn – ‘an English port’
Author: Hugo Blake
Publisher: All’Insegna del Giglio
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2017-09-08
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 8878146498

Livorno fu una creazione postmedievale di notevole successo. Diventò il più grande porto di transito del Mediterraneo e creò il concetto di porto franco in Europa. Costruita dai Granduchi Medici, prosperò come la più importante base commerciale nel Mediterraneo per i Poteri nord-atlantici. Tra questi il principale fu inglese, la cui Royal Navy garantì il suo successo commerciale e il predominio britannico nel Mediterraneo – un’area che era ancora la fonte di prodotti e beni di lusso e che forniva un mercato popoloso per le manifatture, i metalli, il pesce, le riesportazioni coloniali ed i servizi di trasporto inglesi. Questo volume raccoglie quattordici contributi che danno prove materiali della relazione della Gran Bretagna con Livorno e la Toscana. Livorno was a remarkably successful post-medieval creation, which became the greatest transit port in the Mediterranean and pioneered the concept of the free port in Europe. Built by the Medici Grand Dukes, it prospered as the main commercial base in the Mediterranean for north Atlantic powers. Principal amongst these were the English, whose Royal Navy ensured their commercial success and Britain’s dominance of the Mediterranean – an area which was still the source of luxury produce and goods and provided a populous market for British manufactures, metals, fish, colonial re-exports and shipping. This volume brings together fourteen papers highlighting the material evidence of Britain’s relationship with Livorno and Tuscany.

Transnational Patriotism in the Mediterranean, 1800-1850

Transnational Patriotism in the Mediterranean, 1800-1850
Author: Konstantina Zanou
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2018-11-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0191093033

Transnational Patriotism in the Mediterranean investigates the long process of transition from a world of empires to a world of nation-states by narrating the biographies of a group of people who were born within empires but came of age surrounded by the emerging vocabulary of nationalism, much of which they themselves created. It is the story of a generation of intellectuals and political thinkers from the Ionian Islands who experienced the collapse of the Republic of Venice and the dissolution of the common cultural and political space of the Adriatic, and who contributed to the creation of Italian and Greek nationalisms. By uncovering this forgotten intellectual universe, Transnational Patriotism in the Mediterranean retrieves a world characterized by multiple cultural, intellectual, and political affiliations that have since been buried by the conventional narrative of the formation of nation-states. Transnational Patriotism in the Mediterranean rethinks the origins of Italian and Greek nationalisms and states, highlighting the intellectual connection between the Italian peninsula, Greece, and Russia, and reestablishing the lost link between the changing geopolitical contexts of western Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Balkans in the Age of Revolutions. It re-inscribes important intellectuals and political figures, considered 'national fathers' of Italy and Greece (such as Ugo Foscolo, Dionysios Solomos, Ioannis Kapodistrias and Niccolò Tommaseo), into their regional and multicultural context, and shows how nations emerged from an intermingling, rather than a clash, of ideas concerning empire and liberalism, Enlightenment and religion, revolution and conservatism, and East and West.

British Romanticism and the Reception of Italian Old Master Art, 1793-1840

British Romanticism and the Reception of Italian Old Master Art, 1793-1840
Author: Maureen McCue
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2016-05-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317171497

As a result of Napoleon’s campaigns in Italy, Old Master art flooded into Britain and its acquisition became an index of national prestige. Maureen McCue argues that their responses to these works informed the writing of Romantic period authors, enabling them to forge often surprising connections between Italian art, the imagination and the period’s political, social and commercial realities. Dr McCue examines poetry, plays, novels, travel writing, exhibition catalogues, early guidebooks and private experiences recorded in letters and diaries by canonical and noncanonical authors, including Felicia Hemans, William Buchanan, Henry Sass, Pierce Egan, William Hazlitt, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, Anna Jameson, Maria Graham Callcott and Samuel Rogers. Her exploration of the idea of connoisseurship shows the ways in which a knowledge of Italian art became a key marker of cultural standing that was no longer limited to artists and aristocrats, while her chapter on the literary production of post-Waterloo Britain traces the development of a critical vocabulary equally applicable to the visual arts and literature. In offering cultural, historical and literary readings of the responses to Italian art by early nineteenth-century writers, Dr McCue illuminates the important role they played in shaping the themes that are central to our understanding of Romanticism.

Romantic Antiquity

Romantic Antiquity
Author: Jonathan Sachs
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2010-02-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0195376129

This work argues that Rome is relevant to the Romantic period not as the continuation of an earlier neoclassicism, but rather as a concept that is simultaneously transformed and transformative: transformed in the sense that new models of historical thinking produced a changed understandings of historicity itself.

The Poems of Shelley: Volume Four

The Poems of Shelley: Volume Four
Author: Michael Rossington
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 425
Release: 2014-02-03
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1317747860

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was one of the major Romantic poets, and wrote what is critically recognised as some of the finest lyric poetry in the English language. This is the fourth volume of the five-volume The Poems of Shelley, which presents all of Shelley’s poems in chronological order and with full annotation. Date and circumstances of composition are provided for each poem and all manuscript and printed sources relevant to establishing an authoritative text are freshly examined and assessed. Headnotes and footnotes furnish the personal, literary, historical and scientific information necessary to an informed reading of Shelley’s varied and allusive verse. Most of the poems in the present volume were written between late autumn 1820 and late summer 1821. They include Adonais, Shelley’s lament on the death of John Keats, widely recognised as one of the finest elegies in English poetry, as well as Epipsychidion, a poem inspired by his relationship with the nineteen-year-old Teresa Viviani (‘Emilia’), the object of an intense but temporary fascination for Shelley. The poems of this period show the extent both of Shelley’s engagement with Keats’s volume Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820) — a copy of which he first read in October 1820 — and of his interest in Italian history, culture and politics. Shelley’s translations of some of his own poems into Italian and his original compositions in the language are also included here. In addition to accompanying commentaries, there are extensive bibliographies to the poems, a chronological table of Shelley’s life and publications, and indexes to titles and first lines. The volumes of The Poems of Shelley form the most comprehensive edition of Shelley’s poetry available to students and scholars.

The Empire of Stereotypes

The Empire of Stereotypes
Author: R. Casillo
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 388
Release: 2006-05-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1403983216

This book places Germaine de Stael's influential novel, Corrine, or Italy (1807) in relation to preceding and subsequent stereotypes of Italy as seen in the works of Northern European and American travel writers since the Renaissance.

Romantic Paganism

Romantic Paganism
Author: Suzanne L. Barnett
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2018-02-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3319547232

This book addresses the function of the classical world in the cultural imaginations of the second generation of romantic writers: Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Thomas Love Peacock, John Keats, Leigh Hunt, and the rest of their diverse circle. The younger romantics inherited impressions of the ancient world colored by the previous century, in which classical studies experienced a resurgence, the emerging field of comparative mythography investigated the relationship between Christianity and its predecessors, and scientific and archaeological discoveries began to shed unprecedented light on the ancient world. The Shelley circle embraced a specifically pagan ancient world of excess, joy, and ecstatic experiences that test the boundaries between self and other. Though dubbed the “Satanic School” by Robert Southey, this circle instead thought of itself as “Athenian” and frequently employed mythology and imagery from the classical world that was characterized not by philosophy and reason but by wildness, excess, and ecstatic experiences.