Diego Saglia

Laura Bandiera

Drawing on a long-standing tradition of fictional images, British writers of the Romantic period defined and constructed Italy as a land that naturally invites inscription and description. In their works, Italy is a cultural geography so heavily overwritten with discourse that it becomes the natural recipient of further fictional transformations. If critics have frequently attended to this figurative complex and its related Italophilia, what seems to have been left relatively unexplored is the fact that these representations were paralleled and sustained by intense scholarly activities. This volume specifically addresses Romantic-period scholarship about Italian literature, history, and culture under the interconnected rubrics of 'translating', 'reviewing', and 'rewriting'. The essays in this book consider this rich field of scholarly activity in order to redraw its contours and examine its connections with the fictional images of Italy and the general fascination with this land and its civilization that are a crucial component of British culture between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Translating, Reviewing, Rewriting

British Romanticism and Italian Literature

British culture of the Romantic period is distinguished by a protracted and varied interest in things Spanish. The climax in the publication of fictional, and especially poetical, narratives on Spain corresponds with the intense phase of Anglo-Iberian exchanges delimited by the Peninsular War (1808-14), on the one hand, and the Spanish experiment of a constitutional monarchy that lasted from 1820 until 1823, on the other. Although current scholarship has uncovered and reconstructed several foreign maps of British Romanticism - from the Orient to the South Seas - exotic European geographies have not received much attention. Spain, in particular, is one of the most neglected of these 'imaginary' Romantic geographies, even if between the 1800s and the 1820s, and beyond, it was a site of wars and invasions, the object of foreign economic interests relating to its American colonies, and a geopolitical area crucial to the European balance designed by the post-Waterloo Vienna settlement. This study considers the various ways in which Spain figured in Romantic narrative verse, recovering the discursive materials employed in fictional representation, and assessing the relevance of this activity in the context of the dominant themes and preoccupations in contemporary British culture. The texts examined here include medievalizing and chivalric fictions, Orientalist adventures set in Islamic Granada, and modern-day tales of the anti-Napoleonic campaign in the Peninsula. Recovering some of the outstanding works and issues elaborated by British Romanticism through the cultural geography of Spain, this study shows that the Iberian country was an inexhaustible source of imaginative materials for British culture at a time when its imperial boundaries were expanding and its geopolitical influence was increasing in Europe and overseas.

British Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia

Poetic Castles in Spain

Beatrice Battaglia

Picturesque Travels in Austenland

Re-drawing Austen

Ian Haywood

This collection of thirteen specially commissioned essays by international scholars takes a fresh look at the profound impact of the Peninsular War on Romantic British literature and culture. The expertly authored chapters explore the valorization of Spain by nineteenth-century poets such as Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, Robert Southey, S.T. Coleridge, the Shelleys, and Felicia Hemans in contrast to the Enlightenment-era view of Spain as a backwards nation in decline. Topics discussed include the vision of Spain in Gothic fiction, Spanish experiences of exile as exemplified by the conflict between Valentin de Llanos and Joseph Blanco White, and British women writers' approach to peninsular fiction. Spain in British Romanticism: 1800-1840 is essential reading for scholars and enthusiasts of Romantic literature and Spanish history.

1800-1840

Spain in British Romanticism

Diego Saglia

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