Angels and vagabonds : breaking through barriers in the Anglo-Italian encounter

Abstract

The transformative effect of Italy on the English is a literary topos with a long history, most famously articulated by E. M. Forster in his 'Italian' fiction. Like so many writers before him and many subsequent ones, Forster sees something lacking in the culture of northern Europe which is starkly exposed in the Italian sunlight. Brushes with Italian characters constitute the plot's kairos, generating a change in consciousness in the more sensitive or impressionable English protagonists; yet that pivotal figure of the Italian is paper-thin, inconsequential, or dispensed with altogether. The result is, that despite the centrality of Italy in its symbolically liberatory role and of ltalians as catalysts, these works are held, by general critical consensus, to be about the English. Forster's contemporary Rose Macaulay produced a lesser known novel (The Furnace, 1907, never reprinted) apparently belonging to the same genre of the Anglo-Italian comedy of manners, but which furnishes English fiction with a suggestive counterpoint to the Forsterian perspective, one which contemplates and complicates the Anglo-Italian encounter through an Anglo-Italian prism.