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'Ranging from the 1815 Congress of Vienna to the 1861 creation of the Kingdom of Italy, Patricia Cove's richly detailed "case studies" of historical novels, sensation fiction, poems and travelogues illumine the diversity of British, Anglo-Italian and Anglo-Irish literary engagements with the fraught politics and intergenerational dynamics of the Risorgimento.'
Marjorie Stone, Dalhousie University
A transnational approach to Risorgimento culture's contentious and exhilarating nation-building enterprise
Crossing 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.
Patricia Cove is a Writing Advisor at the Dalhousie University Agricultural Campus in Nova Scotia, Canada.
Cover image: Five Days of Milan, Carl Stragliati (1868-1925) © akg-images / Fototeca Gilardi
Cover design: www.hayesdesign.co.uk
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ISBN 978-1-4744-4724-9
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List of contents
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Introduction: Italian Unity and International Alliances
Chapter 1. Romantic Italy and Restoration Politics: Romantic Poetry, Lady Morgan's
Italy and Mary Shelley's
Valperga
Chapter 2. Italian Exiles from Young Italy to 1848: Risorgimento Refugees in Giovanni Ruffini's
Lorenzo Benoni and
Doctor Antonio
Chapter 3. Spying in the British Post Office: Letter-Opening, Italy and Wilkie Collins's
The Woman in White
Chapter 4. Wounded Utterance: Trauma and Italy's Second War of Independence in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's
Poems Before Congress and
Last Poems
Conclusion
Bibliography
About the author
Patricia Cove is a Writing Advisor at the Dalhousie University Agricultural Campus in Nova Scotia, Canada. She conducted this research as a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Victoria on Vancouver Island. Her research on Victorian and Romantic literature appears in
Journal of Victorian Culture,
Nineteenth-Century Contexts,
Victorian Literature and Culture,
Gothic Studies and
European Romantic Review.
