Italian Politics and Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Culture / / Patricia Cove.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Edinburgh University Press Complete eBook-Package 2019
• VerfasserIn: Cove, Patricia,
• Place / Publishing House: Edinburgh : : Edinburgh University Press, , [2022]; ©2019
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Series: Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture : ECSVC
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (200 p.) :; 3 B/W illustrations

A transnational approach to Risorgimento culture’s contentious and exhilarating nation-building enterpriseRe-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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Series Editor’s Preface -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: Italian Unity and International Alliances -- 1 Romantic Italy and Restoration Politics: Romantic Poetry, Lady Morgan’s Italy and Mary Shelley’s Valperga -- 2 Italian Exiles from Young Italy to 1848: Risorgimento Refugees in Giovanni Ruffini’s Lorenzo Benoni and Doctor Antonio -- 3 Spying in the British Post Office: Letter-Opening, Italy and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White -- 4 Wounded Utterance: Trauma and Italy’s Second War of Independence in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Poems Before Congress and Last Poems -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Index