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"Byron in Italy - Venetian debauchery, Roman sightseeing, revolutionary politics in Ravenna, horse riding, swimming, sword-brandishing, pistol shooting, and the poet's 'last attachment' - forms part of the fabric of Romantic mythology. Yet Byron's time in Italy was crucial to his development as a writer, to Italy's sense of itself as a unified nation, to Europe's perceptions of national identity and to the evolution of Romanticism both in Britain and on the Continent. It was also in Italy that Byron honed the dazzling protean ability to reinvent himself, as both poet and cultural icon, which continues to speak directly to readers today. As history again forces Britain to rethink its relationship with the rest of Europe - and Europe to rethink the British - this volume brings together Byron scholars from the UK, Europe and the US to re-assess the topic of 'Byron and Italy' in all its inter-national complexity. It considers Byron's relationship to Italian literature, people, society, geography, art, religion and politics. It discusses Byron's sinuous navigations between British and Italian identities. It sets Byron's writing in Italy - poetry and prose - against a range of contemporary and modern-day contexts - from tourism to ethnography, from Italian sexual mores to geocriticism, from paramilitary uprisings to parabasic downplayings - to better understand the ways in which Italy Italianised Byron and Byron Byronised Italy." -- Back cover Byron in Italy - Venetian debauchery, Roman sight-seeing, revolution, horse-riding and swimming, sword-brandishing and pistol-shooting, the poet's 'last attachment' - forms part of the fabric of Romantic mythology. Yet Byron's time in Italy was crucial to his development as a writer, to Italy's sense of itself as a nation, to Europe's perceptions of national identity and to the evolution of Romanticism across Europe. In this volume, Byron scholars from Britain, Europe and beyond re-assess the topic of 'Byron and Italy' in all its richness and complexity. They consider Byron's relationship to Italian literature, people, geography, art, religion and politics, and discuss his navigations between British and Italian identities Introduction / Alan Rawes and Diego Saglia -- 1. The literature of Italy in Byron's poems of 1817 / Nicholas Halmi -- 2. Byron's ethnographic eye: the poet among the Italians / Gioia Angeletti -- 3. From Lord Nelvil to Dugald Dalgetty: Byron's Scottish identity in Italy / Jonathan Gross -- 4. The garden of the world: Byron and the geography of Italy / Mauro Pala -- 5. 'Something I have seen or think it possible to see': Byron and Italian art in Ravenna / Jane Stabler -- 6. 'Something sensible to grasp at': Byron and Italian Catholicism / Bernard Beatty -- 7. The politics of the unities: tragedy and the Risorgimento in Byron and Manzoni / Arnold Anthony Schmidt -- 8. Parisina, Mazeppa and Anglo-Italian displacement / Peter W. Graham -- 9. This 'still exhaustless mine': De Staël, Goethe and Byron's Roman lyricism / Alan Rawes -- 10. Playing with history: Byron's Italian dramas / Mirka Horová -- 11. 'Where shall I turn me?' Italy and irony in Beppo and Don Juan / Diego Saglia -- Index.
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