Relazione finale    Programma dell’evento

 

Centro Italo-Tedesco per l’Eccellenza Europea

Deutsch-Italienisches Zentrum für Europäische Exzellenz

Deutsch-Italienische Zusammenarbeit in den Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften

2016

 

Projektformat

Close Reading

 

Antragsteller/in (deutsch):

Prof. Dr. Norbert Lennartz, Universität Vechta

 

Antragsteller/in (italienisch):

Prof. Dr. Lilla Maria Crisafulli, Università di Bologna

 

Zusammenfassung:

This seminar aims at a thorough re-reading of canonical as well as non-canonical texts of British Romantics and their literary constructions of Italy. Thereby, nowadays neglected Romantics are sought to be re-discovered and re-evaluated. Moreover, the seminar is meant to foster a fruitful German-Italian cooperation on British Romanticism.

  1. ANGABEN ZU DEN TEILNEHMER

I.4. Teilnehmerliste (bitte mit akademischen Titeln und Nennung der Universität bzw. der sonstigen wissenschaftlichen Einrichtung):

 

Zusagen:

Prof. Dr. Gioia Angeletti, Parma

Prof. Roberto Baronti Marchiò, Cassino

Prof. Dr. Ute Berns, Hamburg

Prof. Dr. Lilla Maria Crisafulli, Bologna

Dr. Franca Dellarosa, Bari

Prof. Dr. Keir Douglas Elam, Bologna

Dr. Carlotta Farese, Bologna

Prof. Dr. Ralf Haekel, Göttingen

Michaela Hausmann, Vechta

Dana Jahn MA, Vechta

Dr. Fabio Liberto, Bologna

Prof. Dr. Michael Meyer, Koblenz

Prof. Dr. Norbert Lennartz, Vechta

Prof. Diego Saglia, Parma

Oliver Schmidt MA, Vechta

Prof. Dr. Gerold Sedlmayr, Dortmund

Prof. Dr. Elena  Anna Spandri, Siena

Dr. Maria Vittoria Spissu, Bologna

 

  1. ECKDATEN ZUR VERANSTALTUNG

 

II.1. Dauer der geplanten Veranstaltung:

4 Tage (11.04.-14.04.2016)

 

II.2. Terminwunsch:

11.04 – 15.04. 2016

 

II.3. Arbeitssprache(n):

English

 

II.4. Wie haben Sie von dem Förderprogramm der „Deutsch-Italienischen Zusammenarbeit in den Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften“ erfahren?

Im Publikationsorgan Forschung & Lehre des DHV

 

IV.1. Projektskizze:

 

IV.1. a) Wissenschaftliche Relevanz des Themas

 

The influential British Romantic and Lake Poet William Wordsworth visited Lake Como during a 1790 walking tour, and subsequently penned the following lines as part of his Prelude:

AND, Como! thou, a treasure whom the earth

Keeps to herself, confined as in a depth

Of Abyssinian privacy. I spake

Of thee, thy chestnut woods, and garden plots

Of Indian-corn tended by dark-eyed maids;

(Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book Sixth, Cambridge and the Alps)

 

These words exist as part of a larger impression of Lake Como that functions almost as an homage to this Italian place. The poem makes it clear that this “treasure” with its “lofty steeps” and its “tones of nature smoothed by learned art” was, for Wordsworth, a place of romantic inspiration where experiences of the sublime were juxtaposed with intensive moments of the picturesque. Despite Wordsworth’s focus on the British landscape and his ingrained dread of the cultural ‘other’, Italy seems to qualify as a place of Arcadian beauty. Although Wordsworth’s texts nowadays receive much critical attention, the Italian episodes of the Prelude seem to have fallen into comparative oblivion; and the same is true of his Memorials of a Tour In Italy (1837), which were published when the age of Romanticism had come to an end and the incipient Victorian age was ready for Charles Dickens’s pejorative impressions of France and Italy in 1844.

The extent to which Italy played a major role in English literary history can be ascertained in the works of Shakespeare. Attracted and repulsed by its history, but also by the fact that it was the centre of Catholicism, Shakespeare catered to and fuelled the general image of Italy as the new Babel, as a place of sexual frivolity and human degeneration, in which milestones of literary culture (Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio) came to be eclipsed by the dubious achieve­ments of Niccolò Machiavelli, Pietro Aretino and their descendants. The Machia­vellian villain, anglicised by Marlowe into ‘Make-evil’, is at the root of most of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes; and thus it is only consistent that with the return of critical interest in Shakespeare in the late 18th century the Machiavellian villain was translated into the ambience of the countless gothic novels. While Italy was still seen through the warped lenses of those who never travelled there and who persistently fostered the image of Italy as the hotbed of bigotry, superstition and kinky sexuality, it was the Romantics who eventually contributed to a revision of the outdated and negative image of Italy. Ready to adopt the tinted perspective of Claude Lorrain (cf. his View of the Tivoli), many 18th– and 19th-century writers and artists crossed the Alps and, by laying the foundations of modern tourism, set about the ambitious project of exploring, rediscovering and reconstructing a new, predominantly Romantic Italy. Attracted by the plethora of cultural and artistic sites, British aristocrats on their Grand Tour not only gave rise to an unprecedented enthusiasm for Italy, some of them also sought refuge in the liberality of a Catholicism which proved to be diametrically opposed to the austere climate of Evangelicalism, which ruthlessly turned them into moral exiles.

Taking Jane Stabler’s recently published study The Artistry of Exile (Oxford UP, 2013) as one of its points of departure, the symposium purports to explore the various Romantic attitudes towards, and constructions of, Italy through the examination of a select range of canonical and non-canonical texts. The corpus comprises the works of British Romantics who went to Italy, more often than not stayed there as ex-patriots and filtered their spontaneous overflow of impressions, feelings and ideas through the highly artificial and intellectual compositions of their poetry. What they recollected in tranquility, however, differs from what they actually saw in the streets of Rome, Venice or Verona. Like Turner’s views of Cologne which proved to be highly individualistic arrangements of visual impressions, the Romantics write about Italy with an acute awareness of literary traditions and fashions.

While Wordsworth and Byron are counted among the ‘Big Six’, scholarly attention to Mary Shelley’s oeuvre has often been limited to her novels. Her Rambles in Germany and Italy has only received sparse academic attention; the travelogue written from the perspective of a woman who seems to have outgrown her generation of Romantics has come to be so marginalised that Christoph Bode’s recent study on Romantic travel accounts, Fremd-Erfahrungen: Diskursive Konstruktion von Identität in der britischen Romantik (WVT, 2009), does not consider it.

Shelley’s outspoken attempt to induce her countrymen’s support of the Italian struggle for independence adds a deliberately political dimension to Rambles. This critical edge did not only set her apart from the majority of previous travel writers but aligned her with Lady Morgan Sidney, an Irish novelist and patriot whose journey to Italy (1821) was meant as a study of the effects the French Revolution had had on the Italian Republics. Lady Morgan’s sympathy with the Italian attempts to emancipate themselves from foreign dominion thus adds another angle of literary constructions of Italy.

Taking into account that Byron looked contempt­uously at most of his contemporaries and that, instead of Wordsworth and Southey, he held nowadays lesser known poets such as Samuel Rogers in high esteem one can safely assume that Rogers’s longish poem Italy (1822) is a response to and a continuation of Byron’s Italy cantos in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. With Canto IV as the backdrop of fashionable poetry about Italy it might prove to be rewarding to retrieve Rogers’s poem from the oblivion into which it seems to have fallen in the wake of the Victorian Age. Beyond that, Rogers’s idealisation of Lake Como and its picturesque surroundings, his visualization of nature as a gigantic theatre (the “noble amphitheater of mountains”), is, on the one hand, different from what Wordsworth was to write, but, on the other, it shows more than clearly the artificiality and staginess of Italy, in which Romantics of all sorts seemed to indulge.

One of the questions that the seminar, thus, wants to address is whether or not there are any connections or possible inter­dependencies between the poets’ literary outputs, and to what extent one text is often a comment on or a reformulation of what others had cast into the stanzaic pattern of their poems. But also, as will be discussed and demonstrated in the case of Percy Bysshe Shelley, among others, in what way the Italian experience has deeply affected the British Romantics’ construction not only of Italy but most of all of Romantic aesthetics itself, therefore giving rise to a new and lively experimental way of writing.

IV.1. b) MethodologischeÜberlegungen:

 In order to attain a broader and profound perspective on the engagement of British Romantics with Italy, a close (re-)reading not only of classical authors and some of their seminal works will be conducted, but also a reading of their lesser known texts, as well as non-canonical authors and their nowadays widely neglected (‘lost’) works. Consequently, the corpus for the proposed seminar will include the following texts

  • Beckford, William. Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents (1783)
  • Byron, George Gordon. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto IV (1818)
  • Hemans, Felicia, “The Restoration of the Works of Art to Italy” (1816)
  • Lady Montagu, “Italy” in: Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M–y W—y M—-e written, during her travels in Europe, Asia and Africa, to persons of distinction, men of letters, etc. (1763–1767)
  • Rogers, Samuel. Italy (1822)
  • Shelley, Mary. Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842 and 1843 (1844)
  • Shelley, Percy B. Prometheus Unbound (Act IV, 1819), A Defense of Poetry (1820)
  • Wordsworth, William, “On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic” (1802)
  • Wordsworth, William. Memorials of a Tour in Italy (1837)
  • Wordsworth, William. The Prelude [Extracts from Book Sixth] (1850)

The close reading approach will further be substantiated by taking into account the historical and socio-cultural climate in which these texts were written and published. This will shed light on possible influences such conditions may have had on the respective constructions of Italy, and reveal intertextual as well as biographical interdependencies.

IV.1. c) Angaben zum Gesprächsformat, innovative Elemente des Gesprächskonzepts:

The discussion formats of the seminar will include plenary talks by participants of the seminar which will serve as expert introductions to the texts and thus form the basis for round-table discussions. In the context of the latter, Romantic scholars and junior academics alike will have the chance to share their interpretations of the texts. As the focus will be on a close reading of canonical as well as non-canonical texts, a form of reading will be conducted in which all participants engage in an expressive reading aloud. Such a format will allow for individual performances, thereby reflecting different inter-pretative approaches which could in turn enrich the discussions.

IV.1. d) Zielsetzung des Gesprächs:

As a consequence of the aforementioned scholarly desiderata (IV.1 a) the goals of this seminar are

  1. to engage in a close reading of both classical and neglected texts of British Roman­ticism in order to identify various literary constructions of Italy and Italian cultural history
  2. to investigate questions of implicit intertextuality and authorial interconnectedness and to enquire into the influence of Italy on the formation of the British Romantic literature.
  3. to renegotiate Romantic canonicity in the context of diachronic and synchronic aesthetic and cultural evaluations
  4. to encourage long term national as well as international networking on the field of British Romanticism
  5. to support scholarly exchange/cooperation among experts and young academics

IV.1. e) Beabsichtigter bzw. Zu erwartender Beitrag zur Förderung der „deutsch-italienischen Beziehungen in Wissenschaft, Bildung und Kultur im europäischen Geist“ (Gemäß dem institutionellen Auftrag der Villa Vigoni):

 The seminar’s binational orientation promises fruitful academic exchange on literary representations of Italy through a native as well as a foreign lens. Furthermore, it strengthens international cooperation between experts in German and Italian universities. The publication of Dickens’s Signs, Readers’ Designs: New Bearings in Dickens Criticism, edited by Norbert Lennartz (Vechta) and Francesca Orestano (Milan) and published by Aracne (Rome) in 2012 already marks a notable example of international scholarly productivity between Italy and Germany.  Apart from the study on English literature in the Victorian Age, the University of Vechta’s forays into German-Italian academic collaboration has also focused on Romanticism which resulted in Norbert Lennartz’s (Vechta) and Tiziana Morosetti’s (Oxford) editorial engagement in a special issue of the Italian journal La Questione Romantica.

Lilla Maria Crisafulli is Professor of English Literature at the University of Bologna. She is the Director of the Interuniversity Centre for Romantic Studies and general editor of the journal La Questione Romantica. She has published several volumes and essays on English Romanticism, Anglo-Italian literary relations, women’s writing, and English theatre and drama (see, among others, the edited volumes: with Cecilia Pietropoli Romantic Women Poets: Genre and Gender, Rodopi 2007; with Keir Elam, Women’s Romantic Theatre and Drama: History, Agency, and Performativity, Ashgate 2010, and, with Fabio Liberto, The Romantic Stage: A Many-sided Mirror, Rodopi 2014). She has also published two monographs on P.B. Shelley (one of which is La realtà del desiderio, Liguori 1999) and articles and editions on John Keats, Lord Byron, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley (of Mary Shelley see the edition of Valperga, Mondadori 2007). Her current research focuses on gender issues emerging in pre-Romantic and Romantic women playwrights who engaged with aspects and figurations of the Orient.

The results of the proposed Villa Vigoni seminar will feed into preparations for another international conference on marginalized and lost Romantics to be held in Vechta at the beginning of 2017. This in turn is designed to initiate a larger DFG-project that will incorporate several internationally linked PhD positions (to be submitted by the summer of 2016). Thereby, the seminar at the Villa Vigoni constitutes an important link between past, present, and future international cooperation between experts from Germany and Italy on the field of Romanticism.