NEW YORK UNIVERSITY AT LA PIETRA ITALY AND ITALIANS IN ENGLISH LITERATURE FROM THE ROMANTICS TO MODERNISM PROF. DOROTHEA BARRETT Thursdays 10.30 – 1.15 PROFESSOR: DOROTHEA BARRETT (cell phone 3487295602; e-mail addresses:
[email protected] and
[email protected]) Ph.D. Cambridge University 1987. Dorothea Barrett has taught at Beijing Normal University (China), Glasgow University (Scotland), and the University of Florence. She is the author of Vocation and Desire: George Eliot's Heroines and various articles; she has edited works by George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, E. M. Forster, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, and others. COURSE DESCRIPTION: Romantic, Victorian, and Modernist writers in both Britain and the United States were fascinated by Italy. Shelly and Byron were inspired by the hope of a new political dawn in the Italian Risorgimento. Robert Browning, George Eliot, and E. M. Forster saw the transition from Medieval to Renaissance culture in Florence as mirroring and offering an example for their own struggles to free themselves from the repression and religious orthodoxy of Victorian England. Henry James and Edith Wharton saw Italy as beautiful and dangerous in equal measure and used it as the setting of stories about the clash of old world and new world cultures. T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound were both profoundly influenced by Dante. Hemingway, like the Italian poet Montale, was an ambulance driver in the Italian army during WWI; both writers rejected the use of high rhetoric, because of their disgust with the way rhetoric was used in the war. Absurdist playwrights Pirandello and Beckett both wrote about alienation and paralysis in a world abandoned by God.