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Italy and George Gissing: A Geocritical Approach

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posted on 2023-07-25, 01:36 authored by Luigi GussagoLuigi Gussago
Victorian novelist George Gissing (1857-1903) was a devotee of ancient Roman culture and visited Italy three times between 1888 and 1897. In spite of this admiration, his relationship with Italy was problematic, largely due to personal mishaps. In light of these conflicting views, my essay considers Gissing’s portrayals of mostly Southern Italian locations through his fiction, letters, and travelogues. The focus lies here not so much on the narrator but on the narrated space, with Bertrand Westphal’s notion of “geocriticism” at its theoretical core. Far from being a utopian haven, Gissing’s Italy emerges as a trans-cultural meeting point where the perception of an “interiorised place” can reshape reality, alter horizons, and redefine established values.

History

Publication Date

2022-01-01

Book Title

Rewriting and Rereading the XIX and XX-Century Canons

Editors

Grassi S Zuccala B

Publisher

Firenze University Press

Place of publication

Florence, Italy

Series

Biblioteca di Studi di Filologia Moderna

Volume

66

Pagination

(p. 113-127)

ISBN-13

978-88-5518-597-4

Rights Statement

© 2022 Author(s) Content license: except where otherwise noted, the present work is released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode). This license allows you to share any part of the work by any means and format, modify it for any purpose, including commercial, as long as appropriate credit is given to the author, any changes made to the work are indicated and a URL link is provided to the license. Metadata license: all the metadata are released under the Public Domain Dedication license (CC0 1.0 Universal: https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode).

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