Abstract
This essay offers a comparison between George Gissing's By the Ionian Sea and Norman Douglas's Old Calabria, two travelogues, published in the first part of the twentieth century, that construct contrasting images of the regions of Italy south of Naples. Gissing's account is limpid, lucid; a voyage into his own imaginative past and into the heart of Magna Graecia, where ‘today’ is ‘an impertinence’. Douglas's account, on the other hand, is disorderly, capacious and polyvocal: his Calabria is one of ‘multiple civilisations’ and one which is palpably capable of fostering the ‘sunny mischiefs’ to which he is inclined. The comparison draws on the biographical, social and cultural contexts in which the two were writing and considers the various means of travel undertaken, the relationship between past and present and that between writer and interlocutor, in the setting of this relatively neglected part of Europe.
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