This recent publication by could be considered as a companion volume to his earlier British Writers and the Experience of Italy (2012). The essays offered here explore the significant Romantic and post-Romantic responses to Italy, its literature, culture and history by some of the prominent British writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and draws on papers presented at various conferences and symposia on Anglo-Italian cultural transactions.
The early chapters focus on Dante’s pervasive influence on Romantic poetry, on ‘the Dantescan voice’ in Shelley and Keats in particular; on Blake’s illustrations of the Inferno; and on Byron’s ‘literary ventriloquism’ in his The Prophecy of Dante . In a later chapter, the adaptation of Pulci’s burlesque style in his Morgante Maggiore by John Hookham Frere and Byron is discussed.
Whereas Frere tactfully avoided Pulci’s blasphemous assertions and poked gentle fun at the foibles, his friends in the Tory cabinet, Byron found the Pulcian style congenial to his new ‘ferocious Caravaggio style’ which served him in his crusade against ‘the moral and political cant’ of his day.
A later chapter charts the irresistible lure of Rome and the various perceptions (and preconceptions) of ancient Rome by prominent Romantic writers including Chateaubriand, Goethe, Madame de Stael, Byron and Shelley. Yeats’s abiding concern with the Italian Renaissance aesthetics as a model for his vision of an Irish Cultural Revival is also discussed.
In appropriating Castiglione’s 'The Book of the Courtier,' Yeats consciously aligned himself with the ‘±è²¹²µ²¹²Ô’ aesthetics of Pater while repudiating the moralistic tenets of Ruskin and Arnold. Another chapter focuses on D.H. Lawrence’s remarkable account of his visit to the abbey of Monte Cassino and his encounter with Maurice Magnus and the learned Benedictine monk Dom Bernardo (actually Dom Mauro Inguanez). The ‘spirit of place’ is vibrantly evoked in Lawrence’s personal and intimate response to the abbey which seemed at the time to cling tenaciously to the past. A final chapter on ‘Italian Culture and British Pragmatics’, which could be considered as an extended postscript to this book, explores the relations between the two cultures British and Italian as they jostled each other for predominance in the island of Malta form the early nineteenth century to the end of the Second World War.
The book, which is dedicated to the memory of Prof. Michael O’Neill, distinguished scholar and poet at Durham University, is published in hardback and soft bound editions.
Peter Vassallo is Prof. Emeritus of the and Comparative Literature and Senior Fellow of the University of Malta.
