Importing Italy: Representations of Italian history in Britain, 1790--1830 (Edward Gibbon, William Roscoe, Lord Byron, J. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi, Felicia Hemans).

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, British writers found inspiration in tales from Italian history. Byron, for instance, is well-known for adapting Italian history in his poems and plays. Yet the histories of Italy published in English during the period have been all but ignored by students of literature, despite the current interest in cultural history. For many British writers, Italy was viewed less as cultural “other” than as “likeness,” an instructive mirroring of Britain itself. Italy's history was constructed by these writers sometimes as cautionary tale, sometimes as exemplar of libertarian values that Britain might profitably emulate. This “identity paradigm” is embedded in their historical prose, whose narratives were frequently mined by later poets.
“Narrative” is an apt term for these histories, for in them the historical format is infused with literary elements that are ideological in implication. In <italic>Antiquities of the House of Brunswick</italic> Edward Gibbon emphasizes both the literary nature of history and its ideological ground. In tracing the Italian ancestry of the current kings of Great Britain, he posits the cultural growth of medieval and renaissance Italy as a metaphor for a comparable growth in Britain. In his <italic>Life of Lorenzo de' Medici </italic> William Roscoe narrates the grandeur of the Italian past, finding in renaissance Florence worthy models of human behavior. The voluminous <italic> Histoire des républiques italiennes du moyen âge</italic> of J. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi, an historical “epic” published in French and English, is a call to emulate the independence of the medieval Italian republics through a revolution in modern Italy. In turn, the poetry of Lord Byron and Felicia Hemans utilizes episodes from these histories to advocate an internationalist, republican perspective.
In the hands of these writers, Italian history <italic>qua</italic> literature becomes an ideological vehicle for presenting a wide range of views on contemporary British and European sociopolitical events. The dual trends of history as literary narrative and history as ideological and cultural statement are brought together within one discourse, each document of which becomes a project of the imagination whereby the past can be explained and the future considered.