Travel Writing
Questions
- How is Italy configured/described by each of the writers?
- What do you understand by 'real' and 'imagined' spaces and how are they reflected in the works of the writers.
- What does Vernon Lee mean by the 'genius loci'?
- Do politics feature in the works, if so how?
Key Reading
Mariana Starke, Travels in Italy (see for example Letter XVI)
Selina Bunbury, A Visit to the Catacombs
Vernon Lee, The Sentimental Traveller (see for example chapter 12)
Barbara Schaff, Handbook of British Travel Writing, chapters 3 and 16
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entries on Bunbury, Lee and Starke
Further Reading
Mirella Agorni, Translating Italy for the Eighteenth Century: Women, Translation and Travel Writing
Tess Cosslett, ‘Revisiting Fictional Italy, 1887-1908: Vernon Lee, Mary Ward, and E. M. Forster’, English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, 52.3 (2009): 312–28.
Elizabeth Crawford, Mariana Starke
Heidi Hansson, 'Selina Bunbury, Religion and the Woman Writer' in James Murphy, The Oxford History of the Irish Book
Kathryn Walchester, Our Own Fair Italy: Nineteenth-Century Women's Travel Writing and Italy, 1800-1844
Alison Chapman and Jane Stabler, Unfolding the South: Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers and Artists in Italy
Leonie Wanitzek, 'The South! something exclaims within me': Real and Imagined Spaces in Italy and the South in Vernon Lee's Travel Writing', Printemps, 83 (2016)
Jeanne Moskal, ‘Gender and Italian Nationalism in Mary Shelley’s Rambles in Germany and Italy’, Romanticism, 5 (1999), 188-201
Vernon Lee at Sestri in 1914