Bibliographic Information

Roman holidays : American writers and artists in nineteenth-century Italy

edited by Robert K. Martin and Leland S. Person

University of Iowa Press, c2002

Available at  / 12 libraries

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Includes bibliographical references and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

Featuring essays by 12 prominent American literature scholars, this text explores the tradition of American travel to Italy and makes a significant contribution to the understanding of 19th-century American encounters with Italian culture and, more specifically, with Rome. The increase in American travel to Italy during the 19th century was partly a product of improved conditions of travel. As suggested in the title, Italy served 19th-century writers and artists as a kind of laboratory site for encountering Others and ""other"" kinds of experience. No doubt Italy offered a place of holiday - a momentary escape from the familiar - but the journey to Rome, a place urging upon the visitor a new and more complex sense of history, also forced a re-examination of oneself and one's identity. Writers and artists found their religious, political and sexual assumptions challenged.

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