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Imagining Italy: Victorian Writers and Travellers

Waters, Catherine and Hollington, Michael and Jordan, John, eds. (2010) Imagining Italy: Victorian Writers and Travellers. Cambridge Scholars, Newcastle Upon tyne, 268 pp. ISBN 1-4438-2384-8. (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided) (KAR id:54892)

The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided.

Abstract

This book is a companion volume to Dickens and Italy, edited by Michael Hollington and Francesca Orestano, which aimed to fill an important gap in our understanding of England's paramount novelist by studying his personal, political and literary relation to the foreign country he loved best of all of those he visited. Its focus is wider and its scope more ambitious and speculative. Without in any way leaving Dickens or his writings about Italy behind, the attempt here is to approach the Victorian fascination with that country from a broader, more theoretical perspective in which several current debates about travel writing are taken up and critically redeployed. The book is articulated in three parts. Part One concerns what the writings of Dickens and other Victorians can tell us about the history and theory of travel and travel writing, and Part Two, what they can tell us about particular Victorian writers themselves and their work. In Part Three the focus shifts in order to compare writing and visual representations of the experience of 'abroad' in general and Italy in particular, in an era when what can be thought of as modern visual culture is gradually taking shape. The book aims to show that the study of how Victorians imagined Italy can lead to a deeper understanding of some of the stereotypes that continue to inform contemporary tourism.

Item Type: Edited book
Subjects: P Language and Literature > PR English literature
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Arts and Humanities > School of English
Depositing User: Catherine Waters
Date Deposited: 12 Apr 2016 12:54 UTC
Last Modified: 16 Nov 2021 10:22 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/54892 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

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