Imagining Italy: Victorian Writers and Travellers (Hardback) | Released: 01 Oct 2010

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.
About the Author: Catherine Waters is a Reader in Victorian Studies at the University of Kent. She is the author of Dickens and the Politics of the Family and Commodity Culture in Dickens's Household Words: The Social Life of Goods (awarded the 2009 Robert Colby Prize by the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals). She has co-edited with Penny Gay and Judith Johnston Victorian Turns, NeoVictorian Returns: Essays on Fiction and Culture for Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2008. Michael Hollington, now retired, was formerly Professor of English at the University of New South Wales in Sydney and at the University of Toulouse-Le Mirail in France. He is the author of books on Dickens, Grass and Mansfield, and is currently editing The Reception of Charles Dickens in Europe for Continuum Press. John O. Jordan is Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Director of the Dickens Project, a multi-campus research consortium. He is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens. His study of Bleak House is forthcoming from the University of Virginia Press.