The essays offered in British Writers and the Experience of Italy (1800-1940) by Prof Peter Vassallo this book explore some of the significant Romantic and post-Romantic constructions of Italy, its culture and history, beginning with Madame de Staël’s seminal Corinne, ou l’Italie (1807), which would prove influential in the aesthetic imaginary shaping and surrounding subsequent literary works about Italy.
The Italian landscape and cultural scene invited both description and re-inscription by some of the prominent British writers of the 19th and early 20th centuries, who were responding to the fascination exerted upon them by Italian culture generally.
The chapters in this book consider the rich texture of this scene of literary and cultural influence, focusing on the perception, representation and appropriation of Italy by some major British writers of the period indicated, among them Lord Byron, Lady Morgan, Percy Shelley, John Keats, George Eliot, John Ruskin, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence and W. B. Yeats.
This publication is being launched on Thursday, 7 February at 5pm in the Faculty of Arts Library, University of Malta, Msida.
About the author
Peter Vassallo holds a BA honours degree in English from the University of Malta where he was awarded the British Council Prize for English Studies. He also holds the degrees of MA and D.Phil from Oxford University where he was Commonwealth Scholar, and later, Fellow. He was a research scholar at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
He is Professor of English Literature at the University of Malta and was formerly head of the English Department (from 1998 to 2006). He is also Chair of the Institute of Anglo-Italian Studies and general editor of the Journal of Anglo-Italian Studies, which he founded. He specialised in Romantic Literature and has published widely on Byron, the English Romantics Poets and on British Writers and Italy. His book on Byron: The Italian Literary Influence (Macmillan, 1984) is considered “the authoritative study on the subject”.
He has been visiting Professor at the Universities of Rome, Pisa; Bologna, Florence, Milan, Venice, Verona, Oxford, St Andrews (Scotland), Salzburg, Innsbruck, Trinity College, Dublin; and guest specialist lecturer at the British Institute Florence.
He was elected president of the International Association of University Professors of English (2007-2010) and a Fellow of the English Association (2011). He is member of the Advisory Board of the journal Romanticism (Edinburgh) and of La Questione Romantica (Bologna) and sits on the Board of Directors of the International Byron Society.
His recent publications are a chapter on Romantic Narrative Poetry in Romanticism: An Oxford Guide ed. Nicholas Roe and a chapter on The Poetry of William Butler Yeats in the Cambridge History of English Literature ed. Michael O’Neill (2010).
His research interests include British and European Romanticism, British-Italian Literary Relations, Classical Mythology in English Literature and Writers and the Mediterranean.