Enchantment and disenchantment : English romantic visions of Italy

Abstract

One cannot define cultural or literary periods in terms of fixed dates; they emerge in long, complex and contradictory processes and trying to bring order to them and identify the moment when the threshold to the new period is actually crossed is difficult, both for those involved in these processes and for the historian looking back at them with hindsight. Let's take the English experience of Italy as an example! To be sure, Italy was not discovered for the English by their Romantic travellers, artists and poets but, I would argue, what began to emerge in the late 18th century was a new attitude towards Italy and new ways of engaging with it. To explore what kinds of thresholds were crossed here -thresholds between England and Italy as well as between a Neo-classical and a Romantic culture - I will look more closely at a handful of images and texts.