Edinburgh University Press
Italian Politics and Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Culture
About this book
A transnational approach to Risorgimento culture’s contentious and exhilarating nation-building enterprise
Key Features
Re-imagines the parameters and duration of the relationship between the Risorgimento and British culture to revitalise critical engagement with the political dimension of nineteenth-century Anglo-Italian studiesMaps the emergence and evolution of major nineteenth-century forms and genres according to the reverberations of Italian politics that shaped the literary landscapeCovers a wide range of diverse sources, including fiction, poetry and polemical and journalistic non-fiction prose, adding to an existing critical debate focused on poetryRethinks nineteenth-century British political debates surrounding liberalism, the nation and the rights of citizens and refugees in light of the seismic geopolitical shift of Italian unificationCrossing borders, political divides and genres, this book examines the intersections among literary works by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Mary Shelley and Wilkie Collins, journalism, parliamentary records and pamphlets, to establish Britain’s imaginative investment in the seismic geopolitical realignment of Italian unification.
Revitalising critical narratives surrounding the mutually constitutive Anglo-Italian relationship, Cove argues that forging a new state demands both making and unmaking; as the Risorgimento re-mapped Europe’s geopolitical reality, it also reframed how the British saw themselves, their politics and their place within Europe.
Topics
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Frontmatter
i -
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Contents
v -
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List of Illustrations
vi -
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Series Editor’s Preface
vii -
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Acknowledgements
ix -
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Introduction: Italian Unity and International Alliances
1 -
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1 Romantic Italy and Restoration Politics: Romantic Poetry, Lady Morgan’s Italy and Mary Shelley’s Valperga
29 -
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2 Italian Exiles from Young Italy to 1848: Risorgimento Refugees in Giovanni Ruffini’s Lorenzo Benoni and Doctor Antonio
62 -
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3 Spying in the British Post Office: Letter-Opening, Italy and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White
95 -
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4 Wounded Utterance: Trauma and Italy’s Second War of Independence in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Poems Before Congress and Last Poems
125 -
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Conclusion
157 -
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Bibliography
167 -
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Index
183
