Locating Italy: East and West in British–Italian Transactions

228 Pages·2013·6.765 MB·English

by  Kirsten Sandrock, Owain Wright

Locating Italy
161 Internationale Forschungen zur
Allgemeinen und
Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft
Begründet von Alberto Martino und in Verbindung mit
Francis Claudon (Université Paris-Est Créteil Val de Marne) – Rüdiger Görner
(Queen Mary, University of London) – Achim Hölter (Universität Wien) –
Klaus Ley (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz) – John A. McCarthy
(Vanderbilt University) – Alfred Noe (Universität Wien) – Manfred Pfister
(Freie Universität Berlin) – Sven H. Rossel (Universität Wien)
herausgegeben von
Norbert Bachleitner
(Universität Wien)
Redaktion: Paul Ferstl und Rudolf Pölzer
Anschrift der Redaktion:
Institut für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Sensengasse 3A , A-1090 Wien
Locating Italy
East and West in British–Italian
Transactions
Edited by
Kirsten Sandrock and Owain Wright
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2013
Title coverpicture: “The Casa d’Oro, Venice” by John Ruskin.
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Literaturwissenschaft” wird ab dem Jahr 2005 gemeinsam von Editions
Rodopi, Amsterdam – New York und dem Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin
herausgegeben. Die Veröffentlichungen in deutscher Sprache erscheinen im
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From 2005 onward, the series “Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen
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ISBN: 978-90-420-3635-2
E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-0905-2
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Table of Contents

Introduction
1) Kirsten Sandrock and Owain Wright
Locating Italy: East and West in British–Italian Transactions 7

I) Processes of Othering in Intercultural Exchanges 17

2) Jean–Jacques Lecercle
Othering the Other: English and Italian in Transaction 19

3) Owain Wright
Orientalising Italy: The British and Italian Political Culture 33

4) Ting Zheng
‘East or West, Home is Best’? An Examination of European
Images of China as the Cultural Other 59

II) Painted Art as Intercultural Medium 93

5) Emily Eells
Viewing the Mona Lisa ‘under a strange mixture of lights’ 95

6) Nick Pearce
A Casualty of War: Laurence Binyon, Raphael Petrucci and Chinese
Painting 111

III) Occident and Orient in British–Italian Literature 131

7) Sharon Ouditt
Eastern Promise in Puglia: Janet Ross on Frederick II and
his Muslim Court 133

8) Kirsten Sandrock
Venice in Coryat’s Crudities (1611): Between Multicultural Community
and Christian Archetype 149
6
9) Martin Stannard
Venice Observed: East Meets West in
Muriel Spark’s Territorial Rights 169

IV) Intercultural Translations in Language Transactions 181

10) Carla Dente
Theory and Practice of Translation between East and West.
The Location of Some Cultural Issues 183

11) Antonella De Nicola
Sharing Eastern Visions: Reflections upon Fausta Cialente’s
Translation of The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell 203

12) Daniele Franceschi
‘Languaging’ and the Construction of Tuscan Identity in
Jeff Shapiro’s Renato’s Luck 217

Notes on Contributors 237
1. Locating Italy: East and West in British–Italian Transactions

Kirsten Sandrock and Owain Wright

To think of Italy in terms of East and West rather than North and South
might, at first sight, seem rather odd. This is particularly true for a volume
that is concerned with British–Italian transactions and which, therefore,
might appear to have a naturally geographical focus on North–South
relations within Europe. At second sight, however, it becomes clear that
whatever might appear customary in terms of perceptions based on physical
geography is not necessarily appropriate with regard to cultural or political
geographies. Norman Davies has suggested that throughout its history the
Mediterranean has been a meeting point of East and West — both culturally
and politically — as much as one of North and South.1 Moreover, Iain
Chambers has argued that Mediterranean civilisation is founded upon the
region’s function as a locus for a multitude of transactions between North,
South, East, and West; ‘an intricate site of encounters and currents’, which
involves the movement of peoples, histories, and cultures.2 In particular,
Chambers singles out Naples as lying at a cultural and geopolitical
crossroads, rather than being situated firmly to one side of either a distinct
North/South or East/West divide.3 In his new history of the Mediterranean
John Julius Norwich provides two separate maps detailing the eastern and
western halves of that sea, and it is not surprising that Italy is the only
country to feature significantly on both of them. The whole of Italy,
including Sardinia and Sicily, is included on the western map together with
Spain, Southern France, and the Tunisian, Algerian, and Moroccan coasts;
Southern Italy, the Adriatic coast, and Sicily are included together with
Greece, Turkey, Syria, Libya, and Egypt on its eastern counterpart.4
Throughout its history, then, it has been possible to view Italy as being
simultaneously part of a North, a South, an East, and a West.
Ever since Edward Said’s classic study Orientalism has shown that
geographical regions are always constructed by a ‘complex hegemony’ of

1 Norman Davies, Europe: East and West (London: Pimlico, 2007), pp.3-4.
2 Iain Chambers, Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity (Durham,
NC and London: Duke University Press, 2008), p.32.
3 Ibid., pp.71-129.
4 John Julius Norwich, The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean (London: Vintage
Books, 2007). See maps of ‘The Eastern Mediterranean’, pp.618-19 and ‘The
Western Mediterranean’, pp.620-21.
8 Kirsten Sandrock and Owain Wright
‘culture, scholarship, or institutions’,5 apparently natural categories such as
the cardinal points of the compass have become questionable touchstones
when exploring intercultural relationships. It has become clear that
geographies are produced rather than being given. Cultural spaces
exis[t] in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power, shaped to a degree by
the exchange with power political (as with a colonial or imperial establishment),
power intellectual (as with reigning sciences like comparative linguistics or
anatomy, or any of the modern policy sciences), power cultural (as with
orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts, values), power moral (as with ideas about
what ‘we’ do and what ‘they’ cannot do or understand as ‘we’ do).6
This complex construction of cultural and political geographies has
significantly shaped the dynamics of British–Italian transactions in a
fascinating process of continual cultural location and relocation. Not only
have the cultural and political boundaries between East and West always
been blurred, but they are bound to become ever more so with the
advancing processes of globalisation. Therefore, in the increasingly
globalised world of the twenty–first century, the traditional categories of
North, South, East, and West are being questioned for their usefulness in
helping us to understand cultural and political spaces and relationships,
including those developed through British–Italian transactions.
In the case of Italy and Great Britain, the geographical construction of
cultural spaces has already been valuably examined with regard to various
British travel narratives. Italy has frequently represented something of a
semi– or non–European Other to British spectators throughout the history
of British–Italian passages. British travellers to Italy have often observed
what they view as Eastern as well as Southern traits in their country of
destination. As Melanie Ord has shown, ‘Italy [represented] a particular
focus for anxiety’ for British travellers in the early modern period, when
Renaissance Italy epitomised ‘a threat of corruption directly proportionable
to its advanced levels of civility’.7 Ord brings out the ambivalence between,
on the one hand, Renaissance Italy’s perceived prominence as a
sophisticated culture and, on the other hand, its morally dubious image in
the eyes of early–modern British travellers. Numerous British visitors have
recorded similar observations on Italy from the early–modern period
onwards, and many have viewed it as an ambiguous cultural space. When D.
H. Lawrence visited Sardinia, an unquestionably Italianate land, he remarked

5 Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003), pp.5, 12.
6 Ibid., p.12.
7 Melanie Ord, Travel and Experience in Early Modern English Literature (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p.4.
Locating Italy: East and West in British–Italian Transactions 9
that its capital, Cagliari, reminded him of Malta, ‘lost between Europe and
Africa and belonging to nowhere’ with its ‘Arab–looking houses’ and the
‘Arab–looking, palm desolated malarial plain’ of its hinterland.8 The
seemingly non–European characteristics in the dress, customs, and manners
that nineteenth–century British travellers observed among the inhabitants of
Italianate islands were often remarked upon by visitors to parts of Southern
and Central Italy. Even the landscape of Northern Italy was suggested by
John Ruskin to be distinct from other European landscapes on account of
its ‘orient colours’, while the people of Venice appeared to sympathise fully
‘with the great instinct of the Eastern races’ through their architecture.9 If
Victorian and Edwardian travellers were only ever prepared to acknowledge
any sense of their own inferiority amid the classical sites of Greece and Italy,
as John Pemble suggests,10 British admiration for those countries focused
overwhelmingly on their pasts and observations on their modern conditions
reflected their inclination to regarding the lands of the Mediterranean as only
semi–European and, therefore, semi–civilised.11 For many British travellers,
Italy has come to represent an ‘inner–European Orient’12 — ‘a place of
ardent and illicit, or transgressive, passions, of eros and thanatos, of love and
madness, of sensuality, licentiousness, prostitution and sexual perversion —
as an Other that exceeds and endangers the symbolic order of the Self’.13
At the same time, Italy has recurrently functioned as an important
gateway to the East for Great Britain. The Italian ports of Genoa, Livorno,
Civitavecchia, Naples, Taranto, and Venice have long served as principal
points of entry and/or departure to and/or from Europe. The simultaneous
construction of the Italian rail network and the Suez Canal made Brindisi a
vital point of communication between Britain and its overseas empire.14
When the famous Orient Express ran from Paris to Istanbul through Italy
during the Cold War, Trieste became a rare portal between East and West.

8 D. H. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia (originally published 1921), in D. H. Lawrence and
Italy (London: Penguin Classics, 2007), pp.190-91.
9 John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice: Vol. 2 The Sea Stories, 2nd edn (London: Smith, Elder,
& Co., 1867), pp.156, 178.
10 John Pemble, The Mediterranean Passion: Victorians and Edwardians in the South (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1987), p.60.
11 C. P. Brand, Italy and the English Romantics: The Italianate Fashion in Early Nineteenth-
Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), pp.196-200.
12 Manfred Pfister, ‘The Passion from Winterson to Coryate’, in Venetian Views,
Venetian Blinds: English Fantasies of Venice, ed. Manfred Pfister and Barbara Schaff
(Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1999), pp.15-27 (p.18).
13 Ibid., p.16.
14 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital 1848-1875 (London: Arrow, 2003; originally
published 1975), p.72.