The Centre for Travel Writing Studies (CTWS) at Nottingham Trent University
  • Home
  • About us
  • Member Profiles
    • Postgraduate Community
  • CTWS Events
  • Collaborations & Funding
  • CTWS Publications
    • Poems of Travel
  • CTWS Blog
  • Centre Links
  • Snapshot Traveller
  • Home
  • About us
  • Member Profiles
    • Postgraduate Community
  • CTWS Events
  • Collaborations & Funding
  • CTWS Publications
    • Poems of Travel
  • CTWS Blog
  • Centre Links
  • Snapshot Traveller
The Centre for Travel Writing Studies (CTWS) at Nottingham Trent University

ctws blog

Freedom by degrees? british women travel writers & the risorgimento (1815-1861)

8/12/2016

 

by rebecca butler

Rebecca Butler is a Research Assistant at CTWS. She recently obtained her PhD from the School of English Literature at Bangor University, where she was supervised by (the late) Dr Stephen Colclough and Prof. Andrew Hiscock. Her thesis focusses on questions of political advocacy and literary authority in Victorian women’s travel writing surrounding the Risorgimento in Italy.

Black and white illustration of Britannia and Italia shaking hands, with Mercury - the messenger of the Gods - behind them.
Britannia and Italia shaking hands. Engraving by F. Bartolozzi after E.F. Burney (1789). Public domain image courtesy of Wellcome Library, London.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Italy - as we know it - did not exist. The peninsula was divided into separate dynasties, most of which were under Austrian rule. Dissatisfaction with these dynastic regimes galvanised a movement towards Italy’s Risorgimento (1815-1861) or  political resurgence, culminating in the Proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy as an independent nation state on 17 March 1861.

Despite the prevailing gender ideology that politics was beyond their proper sphere, British middle-class women were conspicuous in their advocacy for the Risorgimento. In fact, Pamela Gerrish Nunn argues that Victorian women’s discourses surrounding the Italian question provide an index of their shifting role and representation in British society in the decades leading up to the suffragist campaigns.

Travel writing is an apposite genre through which to examine the extent of this discursive engagement. The greater accessibility of the Continent made it easier for upper and middle-class women to travel, albeit under male protection. If purportedly journeying in pursuit of health or cultural enlightenment, Victorian women also enjoyed unprecedented political authority as eye-witnesses to the Risorgimento. Many female tourists brought material in their luggage to supply General Garibaldi and his army with their famed “red shirts”. Small wonder that customs officers ransacked tourists’ suitcases “as if […] a Mazzini would be found hidden in every carpet-bag”, as one traveller August Ludwig von Rochau complained. A few women travellers even acted as political messengers for the revolutionary exile. More frequently (and more legitimately), however, female tourists acted as emissaries for the Risorgimento through their travel accounts.

It was with the particular aim of raising money for the revolutionary exile Ferdinando Gatteschi that Mary Shelley published her travel book Rambles in Germany and Italy […] (1844). Significantly, however, Shelley did not discuss her revolutionary fundraising efforts with her publisher Edward Moxon. Instead, she pitched Rambles in conventionally feminine terms as “light” and “amusing”, avoiding mention of politics. Although often transgressed in actuality, the Victorian middle-class gender ideology of separate spheres nonetheless affected the critical reception of women’s travel writing, impacting on women's political engagement in print.

The etymology of the word Risorgimento, which means a resurgence, rebirth or resurrection, lent itself well to feminine mythologies of the movement. The allegorical representation of Italy as Italia – a woman in chains – further accommodated proto-feminist interpretations of Italian nationalism. One book in particular, Madame de Staël’s Corinne, ou Italie (1807), solidified the imaginative association of Italy with a woman’s country, as a space where women could (paradoxically) enjoy greater freedoms than at home. A bestseller into the 1870s, Corinne offered a flattering model for later women travel writers to adapt by imagining Italy as the home of female creative genius. Declared “[T]he image of our beautiful Italy”, the eponymous heroine also provided a modern allegory for Italy’s political situation, imbricating the woman question with the Italian question.

Women travel writers typically approached the Italian question through domestic discourses. Some – like Shelley – emphasised women’s role in the rebirth of the young nation as civic mothers. This strategy was also used by Mazzini to rally Englishwomen in support of the cause. Others, such as Florence Nightingale, framed their political inquiries as spiritual pilgrimages with Italy’s moral regeneration or resurrection at the bourn. However, as the Risorgimento took a violent turn with the 1848 revolutions, it became more difficult to accommodate Italian politics to conventionally feminine discourses. Accordingly, the didactic travel writer Selina Bunbury asserted her literary authority against Italian revolutionism. Others like Margaret Dunbar grew strangely quiet about the Italian question, focussing instead on a picturesque Italy, sanitized of revolutionary violence.

The relationship between the campaign for female suffrage and Italian independence was therefore much more complicated than the Corinne myth might suggest. Victorian women’s Italianate travel writing may provide an index of their changing role in British society. However, it also evidences women writers’ strategic engagement with the Risorgimento according to its shifting political capital in Britain. Rather than propelling a mutually reinforcing, proto-feminist narrative of women’s liberal engagement with the Risorgimento, Victorian women's travel accounts more often reveal these two campaigns as competing sites of authority.


REFERENCES
  • Bunbury, Selina, A Visit to the Catacombs, or First Christian Cemeteries at Rome: and a Midnight Visit to Mount Vesuvius (London: W.W. Robinson, 1849)
  • Chapman, Alison, ‘On Il Risorgimento’, BRANCH <http://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=alison-chapman-on-il-risorgimento> [accessed 30 June 2014]
  • De Staël, Madame, Corinne, or, Italy, trans. by Isabel Hill (London: Richard Bentley, 1833)
  • Foster, Shirley, Across New Worlds: Nineteenth-Century Women Travellers and their Writings (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990)
  • Moskal, Jeanne, ‘Gender and Italian Nationalism in Mary Shelley’s Rambles in Germany and Italy’, Romanticism, 5 (1999), 188-201
  • Nightingale, Florence, Florence Nightingale in Rome: Letters Written by Florence Nightingale in Rome in the Winter of 1847-1848, ed. by Mary Keele (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1981)
  • Nunn, Pamela G., ‘Liberty, Equality and Sorority: Women’s Representations of the Unification in Italy’, in Unfolding the South: Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers and Artists in Italy, ed. by Alison Chapman and Jane Stabler (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 110-36
  • O’Connor, Maura, The Romance of Italy and the English Imagination (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998)
  • Shelley, Mary, Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843, 2 vols (London: Edward Moxon, 1844)
  • Von Rochau, A[ugust] L[udwig], Wanderings through the Cities of Italy in 1850 and 1851, trans. by Mrs Percy Sinnett, 2 vols (London: Richard Bentley, 1853)

PhD Studentship: the Literature of Travel

7/8/2016

 
We welcome applications from prospective students wishing to pursue a PhD on travel writing under the guidance of a supervision team led by Professor Tim Youngs at the Centre for Travel Writing Studies.

There is no restriction as to historical or geographical focus or type of critical approach, but proposals relating to post-medieval travel writing and any of the following areas may be especially welcome: North America; Italy; India; travel writing and modes of transport; the poetry of travel; modernism and travel; postcolonialism and travel; creative-critical work; radical travel writing; diasporic travel narratives; travel writing and the Midlands. We also welcome single-author studies, particularly of unjustly neglected figures.

The studentship covers the cost of fees at home/EU rates and includes an annual stipend in line with AHRC bursary rates (£14296) for 3 years.
The successful applicant will be expected to support the Centre’s activities.

Closing Date:  5pm on Monday, 29 August 2016. 

For full details on how to apply, visit:
http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/AOF957/professor-tim-youngs-the-literature-of-travel/

Job vacancy: Lecturer/senior lecturer in english

7/8/2016

 
The School of Arts and Humanities seeks to appoint a Permanent Lecturer in English from 1 October 2016. The post affords an opportunity to join the Centre for Travel Writing Studies, as travel writing is one of the areas of interest. Candidates are sought with specialisms in two or more of the following: Travel writing, Romantic literature and Gothic literature. A broad knowledge and understanding of the major subject areas within English Studies is also required.

Closing date: 5pm on Sunday, 14 August 2016.

For full details on how to apply, visit:
https://vacancies.ntu.ac.uk/displayjob.aspx?jobid=3046

phd studentship in the literature of travel

3/5/2016

 
Opportunity for a fully funded PhD studentship in the Literature of Travel at the Centre for Travel Writing Studies as part of the NTU Vice-Chancellor's Researcher Development Scheme.

We welcome applications from prospective PhD students wishing to work on a travel writing project under the guidance of a supervision team led by Professor Tim Youngs. There is no restriction as to historical or geographical focus or critical approach, but proposals relating to any of the following areas may be especially welcome: North America; Italy; India; travel writing and modes of transport; the poetry of travel; modernism and travel; postcolonialism and travel; creative-critical work; radical travel writing; diasporic travel narratives; travel writing and the Midlands. We also welcome single-author studies, particularly of unjustly neglected figures. The successful applicant will be expected to support CTWS activities.

Exceptional candidates will have the chance to follow up their PhDs with a one year position at NTU as a full-time Postdoctoral Research Associate.

Deadline for Applications: 5pm on Sunday, 5 June 2016

For details on how to apply visit: http://tinyurl.com/zhg2laf

Forward>>

    Archives

    October 2021
    April 2021
    October 2020
    February 2019
    October 2017
    July 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    August 2016
    May 2016

    Categories

    All
    Call For Submissions
    Jobs
    Research Spotlight
    Studentships
    Visiting Writers

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.