Francesco Marroni - Böcker

This volume presents a collection of original and interconnected essays which aim to chart Elizabeth Gaskell’s literary imagination by focusing on diverse aspects of her short stories. It includes the papers read at the conference on «Elizabeth Gaskell and the art of the short story», organized by the Centre for Victorian and Edwardian Studies (CUSVE, «G. d’Annunzio» University, Pescara, 2010), to celebrate the bicentenary of her birth. While offering fresh insights into Gaskell’s shorter fiction, this collection provides an introduction to the many issues that absorbed her literary attention. Most importantly, by considering the growing significance of some neglected aspects of her works and the cultural and ideological context in which she lived, the contributions collectively delineate Gaskell’s artistic tensions, ethical sensibility and social commitment in a rapidly changing world. In their overall critical design, the contributors intend to shed light on the complex web of dialogic suggestions underlying her fiction, while at the same time revealing the extraordinary and multifaceted inventiveness of one of the most important Victorian writers.

This volume offers a critical insight into the life and work of the controversial Victorian explorer and translator Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890). Analysis focuses on his travel accounts and erotic translations, which both re-elaborated and challenged dominant Victorian discourses on race, gender and sexuality, generating controversies in the fields of anthropology, sexology and medicine. The premise of the study is that Burton entertained an ambiguous relationship with the colonial institutions: on the one hand, he pursued the colonial project, while on the other, he was an irreverent outsider who clashed with the imperial authorities. As this investigation reveals, he defied British sociocultural norms by appropriating and importing the rituals and languages of the colonial subjects. The volume examines Burton’s ‘impersonations’ of multiple masculine identities in the countries that he visited, which involved elaborate processes of both identification and dis-identification. The author argues that these impersonations enabled a series of queer encounters which broke down the barriers between imperial Self and colonised Other, and led Burton to embody several self-conscious, performative constructions of masculinity. Burton’s life and works are analysed in light of recent critical and theoretical debates.

This study traces the poetic development of Arthur Hugh Clough through a methodological approach based on close readings of his most important works with separate chapters devoted to the three great poems of his maturity: The Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich, Amours de Voyage and Dipsychus. Attention is also given to the socio-cultural context and the religious and political debates which contributed in shaping Clough’s artistic and ideological vision, particularly through the influential figures of Thomas Arnold, John Henry Newman and Ralph Waldo Emerson. That Clough remains to this day one of the most neglected nineteenth-century writers is all the more remarkable given the importance of his intellectual contribution to his times and his radical questioning of religious faith, traditional values and poetic norms.