Roman holidays : American writers and artists in nineteenth-century Italy / edited by Robert K. Martin and Leland S. Person.

ISBN:

9781587294044

Title:

Author:

Martin, Robert K., 1941-

Publication Information:

Physical Description:

1 online resource (vi, 256 pages) : illustrations

Contents:

Where is Hawthorne's Rome? The marble faun and the cultural space of middle-class leisure / Richard H. Millington -- "An awful freedom": Hawthorne and the anxieties of the carnival / Robert K. Martin -- Fauns and Mohicans: narratives of extinction and Hawthorne's aesthetic of modernity / Kristie Hamilton -- The purloined studio: [the] woman sculptor as phallic ghost in Hawthorne's The marble faun / Nancy Proctor -- Hawthorne's ghost in James's Italy: sculptural form, romantic narrative, and the function of sexuality in The marble Faun, "Adina," and William Wetmore Story and his friends / John Carlos Rowe -- Falling into heterosexuality: sculpting male bodies in The marble faun and Roderick Hudson / Leland S. Person -- Roman springs and Roman fevers: James, gender, and transnational dis-ease / Priscilla L. Walton -- Henry James's Italian hours and the "Ruskinian contagion" / Adam Parkes -- Fuller, Hawthorne, and imagining urban spaces in Rome / Brigitte Bailey -- The black robe of romance: Hawthorne's shadow and Howells's Italian priest / Susan M. Griffin -- "The connecting link of centuries": Melville, Rome, and the Mediterranean, 1856-1857 / Robert Milder -- Road to Africa: Frederick Douglass's Rome / Robert S. Levine.

Local Note:

eBooks on EBSCOhost

Subject Term:

American literature -- Italian influences.

Travelers' writings, American -- History and criticism.

American prose literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism.

Americans -- Italy -- History -- 19th century.

Authors, American -- 19th century -- Biography.

Travel writing -- History -- 19th century.

Artists -- United States -- Biography.

Geographic Term:

Italy -- Description and travel.

Rome (Italy) -- In literature.

Rome (Italy) -- In art.

Italy -- In literature.

Italy -- In art.

Italie -- Descriptions et voyages.

Added Author:

Martin, Robert K., 1941-

Person, Leland S.

Format:

Electronic Resources

Electronic Access:

Click here to view

Publication Date:

2002

Publication Information:

Available:*

Shelf Number	Material Type	Copy	Shelf Location	Status
810.9003 22	1:E-BOOK	1	1:ONLINE	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

Featuring essays by twelve prominent American literature scholars, Roman Holidays explores the tradition of American travel to Italy and makes a significant contribution to the understanding of nineteenth-century American encounters with Italian culture and, more specifically, with Rome. The increase in American travel to Italy during the nineteenth century was partly a product of improved conditions of travel. As suggested in the title, Italy served nineteenth-century writers and artists as a kind of laboratory site for encountering Others and "other" kinds of experience. No doubt Italy offered a place of holiday--a momentary escape from the familiar--but the journey to Rome, a place urging upon the visitor a new and more complex sense of history, also forced a reexamination of oneself and one's identity. Writers and artists found their religious, political, and sexual assumptions challenged. Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun has a prominent place in this collection: as Henry James commented in his study of Hawthorne, the book was "part of the intellectual equipment of the Anglo-Saxon visitor to Rome." The essayists also examine works by James, Fuller, Melville, Douglass, Howells, and other writers as well as such sculptors as Hiram Powers, William Wetmore Story, and Harriet Hosmer. Bringing contemporary concerns about gender, race, and class to bear upon nineteenth-century texts, Roman Holidays is an especially timely contribution to nineteenth-century American studies.

Author Notes

Robert Martin is professor of English and chair of the department at the Université de Montréal.

Reviews (1)

Choice Review

The title reference to the 1953 Italian-escapade movie suggests how in the mid-19th century some Americans used Italian travel to take a "moral holiday." The gesture explains the collection's heavy investment in Hawthorne's Marble Faun, emigre sculptors, Henry James, and gender-identity issues. These discussions account for the majority of the volume's 12 essays (all drawn from a conference in Rome) and foreground Italy as a scene of solipsistic American self-making at the expense of convulsive national events that dominated consciousness across the period--the Italian revolution and the American Civil War. Introductory characterizations of Italy (as "site of political contestation" and "magic mirror [of] ... American [political] issues") are shallow ways of phrasing the moral claims of these struggles; essays on the more politically conscious Margaret Fuller, Melville, Howells, and Frederick Douglass are relegated to the back of the book. But the book provides critical and contextual perspective. Exposed in vivid relief is a US cultural complacency that felt entitled both to consume Italy's artistic and cultural legacy and to disparage its contemporary possessors, an attitude several distinguished contributors are willing to call at least self-serving and "touristic," at worst colonialist, even racist. Handsomely presented, with apt sculptural illustrations, good supportive notes to each essay; upper-division undergraduates and above. F. Alaya emerita, Ramapo College of New Jersey