Winner of the Elma Dangerfield Prize 2018

Byron in Italy – Venetian debauchery, Roman sight-seeing, revolution, horse-riding and swimming, sword-brandishing and pistol-shooting, the poet’s ‘last attachment’ – forms part of the fabric of Romantic mythology. Yet Byron’s time in Italy was crucial to his development as a writer, to Italy’s sense of itself as a nation, to Europe’s perceptions of national identity and to the evolution of Romanticism across Europe. In this volume, Byron scholars from Britain, Europe and beyond re-assess the topic of ‘Byron and Italy’ in all its richness and complexity. They consider Byron’s relationship to Italian literature, people, geography, art, religion and politics, and discuss his navigations between British and Italian identities.

Introduction – Alan Rawes and Diego Saglia
1 The literature of Italy in Byron’s poems of 1817–20 – Nicholas Halmi
2 Byron’s ethnographic eye: the poet among the Italians – Gioia Angeletti
3 From Lord Nelvil to Dugald Dalgetty: Byron’s Scottish identity in Italy – Jonathan Gross
4 The garden of the world: Byron and the geography of Italy – Mauro Pala
5 ‘Something I have seen or think it possible to see’: Byron and Italian art in Ravenna – Jane Stabler
6 ‘Something sensible to grasp at’: Byron and Italian Catholicism – Bernard Beatty
7 The politics of the unities: tragedy and the Risorgimento in Byron and Manzoni – Arnold Anthony Schmidt
8 Parisina, Mazeppa and Anglo-Italian displacement – Peter W. Graham
9 This ‘still exhaustless mine’: De Staël, Goethe and Byron’s Roman lyricism – Alan Rawes
10 Playing with history: Byron’s Italian dramas – Mirka Horová
11 ‘Where shall I turn me?’ Italy and irony in Beppo and Don Juan – Diego Saglia
Index