Artistry of Exile: Romantic and Victorian Writers in Italy

The Artistry of Exile is a new reading of one of the most important themes of nineteenth-century literature. Exile represents a crisis in the always present tension between self and culture, the disturbance of memory, the quest for home, and the survival or not of life's heart quakes -- all of which became identifying features of canonical Romanticism. Focusing on two interlinked groups of writers who, for various reasons, felt cast out of England and sought refuge in Italy, this book traces the material and metaphoric dynamics of distance in poems, novels and epistolary conversations. The book brings into dialogue the self-alienation and existential antagonism of the Cain figure with the contingencies of real travel: conversations about writing desks, lost parcels of books, missing pans and stray camels. Domestic and cosmic perspectives mingle as the book reveals how writers realize the full resonance of Dante's vivid summation of exile in the taste of different bread and the difficulty of another man's stairs. As a country that only exists in the early nineteenth-century as a memory, Italy both embodies and energises formal attempts to bridge the distance created by exile in the work of the Byron-Shelley circle and the later Barrett-Browning- Browning collaboration. Examining these writers in relation to Italian art, sound, religion, narrative art and history, the book presents a new perspective on Romantic canonicity and relocates contemporary ideas of cosmopolitanism in the aesthetic, ethical and political debates of the late Romantic and early Victorian world.

"This is a solid collection of essays containing some real gems. It is a significant and useful for anyone interested in the history and sociology of race and religion in the United States."

--Journal of Southern Religion

"This is a rich and sophisticated treatment of an important segment of nineteenth-century English literature... the book is a marvel of erudition, and at least twice its impressive scholarship makes the light of human experience shine through, dissolving the barrier between the textual and the biographical... This egalitarian approach provides a new perspective on the human experience of the exiles studied here. For me, that is the best thing about this book." --Richard Lansdown, Review 19

"Marshalling a variety of materials into an organic structure, her volume fully succeeds in capturing the textual and experiential intricacies of being in another country and "in another language" for Romantic and Victorian writers in Italy. In doing so, it tests and challenges received ideas about Romantic poetry and highlights some of its continuities with Victorian literature. It also throws light on a broad spectrum of usually overlooked prose writings ... A highly rewarding read, The Artistry of Exile is further evidence of Stabler's ability to offer engaging and timely research about central aspects of nineteenth-century literature and culture. As it opens up new insights into Romantic and Victorian experiences in Italy, it throws light on the body of intermediate, transcultural and transitional writing that emerged from them, and confirms the status of these transcriptions of displacement as sources of endless literary and cultural fascination."

--Diego Saglia,IUniversity of Parma

"This is a solid collection of essays containing some real gems. It is a significant and useful for anyone interested in the history and sociology of race and religion in the United States."

--Journal of Southern Religion

"This is a rich and sophisticated treatment of an important segment of nineteenth-century English literature... the book is a marvel of erudition, and at least twice its impressive scholarship makes the light of human experience shine through, dissolving the barrier between the textual and the biographical... This egalitarian approach provides a new perspective on the human experience of the exiles studied here. For me, that is the best thing about this book." --Richard Lansdown, Review 19

Dr Jane Stabler teaches at the School of English, University of St Andrews. She is the author of Byron Poetics and History (2002), and is working on the 7-volume Longman Annotated English Poets Edition of Lord Byron's poetry.

Introduction: The experience of exile and the flight to Italy

1. The bow shot of exile

2. Fare Thee Well!

3. Cain or Christ

4. Boccaccio's lore

5. Strange approximations

6. Doubtful law

7. The calentures of music

Conclusion