Unfolding the south : nineteenth-century British women writers and artists in Italy

An examination of Anglo-Italian cultural relations in the late Romantic and Victorian periods that aims to correct traditional male-centred accounts, this text responds to developments in the fields of literary criticism and art history covering a range of writers and artists inspired by Italy's monumental past and revolutionary struggle for identity.

It offers new perspectives on well-known figures such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot and Mary Shelley together with discussions of writers and artists of newly-emerging importance such as Vernon Lee, Theodosia Garrow Trollope, Marie Spartalli Stillman and Jane Benham Hay.

The essays reassess the inter-relationship between women, art and the Italian peninsula through an examination of a wide generic scope, including travel writing, fiction, art history, poetry, journalism and epistolarity.

Topics discussed within the text include: aesthetics, politics, religion, the Renaissance and the Risorgimento, social history, art history, spiritualism and science.