Italian Politics and Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Culture

'Ranging from the 1815 Congress of Vienna to the 1861 creation of the Kingdom of Italy, Patricia Cove's richly detailed "case studies" of historical novels, sensation fiction, poems and travelogues illumine the diversity of British, Anglo-Italian and Anglo-Irish literary engagements with the fraught politics and intergenerational dynamics of the Risorgimento.'
Marjorie Stone, Dalhousie University

A transnational approach to Risorgimento culture's contentious and exhilarating nation-building enterprise

Crossing borders, political divides and genres, this book examines the intersections among literary works by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Mary Shelley and Wilkie Collins, journalism, parliamentary records and pamphlets to establish Britain's imaginative investment in the seismic geopolitical realignment of Italian unification.

Revitalising critical narratives surrounding the mutually constitutive Anglo-Italian relationship, Cove argues that forging a new state demands both making and unmaking; as the Risorgimento re-mapped Europe's geopolitical reality, it also reframed how the British saw themselves, their politics and their place within Europe.

Patricia Cove is a Writing Advisor at the Dalhousie University Agricultural Campus in Nova Scotia, Canada.

Cover image: Five Days of Milan, Carl Stragliati (1868-1925) © akg-images / Fototeca Gilardi
Cover design: www.hayesdesign.co.uk

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ISBN 978-1-4744-4724-9
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