Exiles, emigres and intermediaries : Anglo-Italian cultural transactions

390 Pages·2010·12.46 MB·English

by  Barbara Schaff

Exiles, Emigrés and
Intermediaries
139 Internationale Forschungen zur
Allgemeinen und
Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft
In Verbindung mit
Norbert Bachleitner (Universität Wien), Dietrich Briesemeister (Friedrich
Schiller-Universität Jena), Francis Claudon (Université Paris XII), Joachim
Knape (Universität Tübingen), 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
Alberto Martino
(Universität Wien)

Redaktion: Paul Ferstl und Rudolf Pölzer
Anschrift der Redaktion:
Institut für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Berggasse 11/5, A-1090 Wien
Exiles, Emigrés and
Intermediaries
Anglo-Italian
Cultural Transactions
Edited by
Barbara Schaff

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010
This book is the result of a collaborative international research project,

In Medias Res: British-Italian Cultural Transactions, generously supported by
the British Academy.
Cover image: Ford Madox Brown, The Last of England, 1852-55,
oil on panel, oval 82.5 x 75 cm.
© Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery.
Cover design: Pier Post
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ISBN: 978-90-420-3068-8
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Contents

BARBARA SCHAFF
Introduction: Paradise of Exiles? 9

1. Early Cultural Mediations

WILLIAM THOMAS ROSSITER
‘Amydde the see’ (‘in alto mar’):
Chaucer, Petrarch, and the Poetics of Exile 23

RALF HERTEL
Nationalising History? Polydore Vergil’s Anglica Historia,
Shakespeare’s Richard III, and the Appropriation of the English Past 47

MICHAEL WYATT
John Florio’s Translation of Kingship:
An Italian Baptism for James VI/I’s Basilikon Doron 71

2. Diplomatic Interventions

DONATELLA ABBATE BADIN
Lady Morgan, an Ambassador of Goodwill to Italian Exiles 87

SIMONETTA BERBEGLIA
James Montgomery Stuart: A Scotsman in Florence 117

PETER VASSALLO
John Hookham Frere, Gabriele Rossetti, and Anglo-Italian
Cooperation in Exile 131

OWAIN J. WRIGHT
The ‘Pleasantest Post’ in the Service? Contrasting British
Diplomatic and Consular Experiences in Early Liberal Italy 141
3. Religious and Political Difference

GABY MAHLBERG
‘All the conscientious and honest papists’: Exile and Belief
Formation of an English Republican 161

XAVIER CERVANTES
‘Null’altra Musica è qui gradita che la nostra’? Cultural Politics, Anti-
Catholic Anxiety, and the Italian Operatic Community in London in the
1720s 177

MAURIZIO MASETTI
The 1844 Post Office Scandal and its Impact on English Public
Opinion 203

4. Itinerant Communities

STEFANO VILLANI
The Italian Protestant Church of London
in the 17th Century 217

PETER HOARE
‘A Room with a View – and a Book’:
Some Aspects of Library Provision for
English Residents and Visitors to Florence, 1815-1930 237

TONY KUSHNER
Negotiating and Narrating Homelessness:
Refugees from the 1930s 255

5. Perspectives and Poetics of Literary Exile

TOBIAS DÖRING
Imaginary Homelands?
D.G. Rossetti and his Father between Italy and England 271
FABIENNE MOINE
The Diary of an Ennuyée:
Anna Jameson’s Sentimental Journey to Italy
or the Exile of a Fragmented Heart 289

CHRISTOPHER WHALEN
‘A Little Ireland’: James Joyce, Dublin, and Trieste 301

MARA CAMBIAGHI
The Inner Exile of Beppe Fenoglio 321

6. Mobile Aesthetics

BRENDAN CASSIDY
Gavin Hamilton: A Scots Dealer in
Old Masters in 18th Century Rome 343

DAVID EKSERDJIAN
Crowe and Cavalcaselle then and now 357

EMMA SUTTON
‘English Enthusiasts’: Vernon Lee and Italian Opera 375

Notes on Contributors 403
Barbara Schaff

Introduction: Paradise of Exiles?

I.
Recent research in the humanities is coming increasingly to engage with
transnational perspectives that address questions of cultural interaction,
communication, and exchange across national boundaries. In accordance with
this innovative research perspective, this collection of essays, based on the
second colloquium of the British Academy project In Medias Res: British-
Italian Cultural Transactions held in 2007, investigates the historic
resonance of transnational encounters and movements between Italy and
Britain as two European cultures that look back on a long history of mutual
cross-fertilisation. The following chapters are written by contributors from
Great Britain, Italy, Malta, France and Germany, members of or affiliated
with the European In Medias Res research project led by Martin Stannard,
The University of Leicester. They are drawn from a range of academic
disciplines including literary studies, history, musicology, art history and
bibliography. They analyse the ways in which the activities of exiles and
their cultural perspectives interact with the sometimes repressive and
constrictive religious or political systems and ideologies that they encounter,
exploring the dynamic and productive cultural forces engendered by exiles,
liminal wanderers, and diasporic communities in Britain and Italy over a
period of more than 500 years. In particular it is the borderland condition of

exiles, émigrés, expatriates and intermediaries that leads not only to the
articulation of a sense of loss and grief, but also to the cultural enrichment
that displacement can engender.1
The myth of exile begins, at least in Western culture, with the account in
Genesis of the expulsion from the garden. Historically, the typology of the
exile is linked with the rise of the nation state. Literary scholarship has had a
longstanding interest in the condition of the exile, through which it has
explored ideas of the psychological and material circumstances of
dislocation, of fragmentation of identity, of linguistic hybridity, and the kind
of narrative incoherence that seemed perfectly to symbolise the modern

1 For an example see Sharon Ouditt (ed.), Displaced Persons: Conditions of Exile in European
Culture (Farnham: Ashgate, 2002), which analyses the condition of exile in a wider
European context.
10 Barbara Schaff
condition. Within this field of research, it is the 20th century exile that has
excited the widest critical attention, not least because, as Edward Said has
reminded us, “the difference between earlier exiles and those of our own time
is, it bears stressing, scale: our age – with its modern warfare, imperialism,
and the quasi-theological ambitions of totalitarian rulers – is indeed the age
of the refugee, the displaced person, mass immigration”.2 The hitherto
unprecedented forced migration of thousands of well-trained professionals,
writers and artists in the political climate of dictatorship and genocide which
shaped the 20th century understanding of the condition of exile as a
monumental human tragedy has thus resulted in plentiful research on the
condition of exile and the consequences of geographical and cultural
displacement for artistic production.
Moreover, the condition of the exile has also been traditionally linked to
the Romantic idea of genius, a creative mode of artistic expression that can
be construed as a condition of displacement making it possible to negotiate
positions of identity, as well as political and cultural affiliation, from an
eccentric point of view. One expression of this idea is articulated by George
Steiner whose notion of an extra-territorial literature in the context of the
exiled artist finds an analogue in the Byronic hero: “It seems proper that
those who create art in a civilisation of quasi-barbarism, which has made so
many homeless, should themselves be poets unhoused and wanderers across
language. Eccentric, aloof, nostalgic, deliberately untimely.”3 Seen from this
perspective, exile then becomes the essential condition of the artist and
intellectual, and is imbued, through loss, with creative power and energy as
well as the critical advantage of the outsider. The exile or émigré is capable
of surveying society from a broader perspective, on the assumption that it is
only from a distance that one can understand culture as a totality. Terry

Eagleton has similarly argued that English culture in the first decades of the
20th century was largely revitalised by exiles and émigrés, because neither the
lower middle class novel nor the liberalism and elitism typical of the
Bloomsbury milieu, despite their sometimes ostensible opposition to the
dominant cultural orthodoxy, were capable of transcending the society to
which they reacted.4 Displaced writers like Joseph Conrad, Henry James, T.S.
Eliot and James Joyce could capture the contemporary fragmentation and

2 Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2000), p.174.
3 George Steiner, Extraterritorial. Papers on Literature and the Language Revolution (New
York: Atheneum 1975), p.11.
4 Terry Eagleton, Exiles and Emigrés: Studies in Modern Literature (London: Chatto &
Windus, 1970).