Nordic Italies

Because of its history, art, and natural and cultural landscapes, Italy has been a popular destination for North-European travellers since the age of the Grand Tour. Yet, literary images of Italy are not all linked to the tradition of the journey to this country and cannot be labelled as a manifestation of Northerners’ yearning for the Southern sun. The corpus of critical literature which deals with Italy in Nordic literatures is very wide but also fragmentary. While many scholars have written about this topic and chiefly on the relations between individual Scandinavian literatures or well-known authors – such as Henrik Ibsen, Selma Lagerlöf and Hans Christian Andersen – and Italy, few have emphasised their variety, plurality, and complexity. With its comparative approach, this study casts a new light on a selection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century representations of Italy and presents some of these Nordic Italies. Taking into account texts of different genres – poetry, drama and novel – and focusing on theories of representation, genre, and space, this book examines complex and heterogeneous literary representations that cannot be reduced to a single stereotype. In these texts, Italy emerges both as a set of physical spaces and as a series of metaphorical concepts. How are these Italian spaces and identities constructed and what do they stand for? What forms does the broad concept of Italianness take in these literary works? How are the Italian settings and characters, as well as the aspects of Italian politics, history, society, culture, and folklore that populate so many literary texts, shaped and combined? Is there a relationship between specific literary genres and the way in which Italy is represented? These are only some of the questions addressed by this study, which demonstrates how Nordic representations of Italy express much more than  unanimous praise for the sun, idyllic landscapes, ruins, and mandolin players.

Dr Elettra Carbone is Senior Teaching Fellow in Norwegian at the Department of Scandinavian Studies, UCL. She holds a PhD in Scandinavian Studies and an MA in Comparative Literature from UCL. She has co-edited a number of anthologies on different aspects of Nordic culture and literature. These include a publication on the reception of the Italian Risorgimento in Norway (Lyset kommer fra sør, Gyldendal, 2011) and a themed issue of the journal Scandinavica on Nordic publishing and book history (Scandinavica 51:2, 2012).

Elettra Carbone has published extensively in peer-reviewed journals and anthologies on representations of Italy in Nordic Literatures, Hans Christian Andersen, and the relationship between literature and sculpture. Her current research interests include the cultural mobility of Thorvaldsen’s sculptures through print culture, and the reception of the Norwegian constitution of 1814 in European literature.

Anno: 2016
Pagine: 432
Formato: 14 x 20 cm
Peso Kg: 0.475
Colore: B/N
Copertina: Morbida
Legatura: Brossura
Lingua: Inglese
ISBN cartaceo: 9788868123840
ISBN digitale: 9788868126292