Italian Politics and Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Culture, by Patricia Cove

Abstract

Reviewed by: Italian Politics and Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Culture by Patricia Cove Diana Moore (bio) Italian Politics and Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Culture, by Patricia Cove; pp. x + 190. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019, $105.00, $24.95 paper, $27.94 ebook Patricia Cove's Italian Politics and Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Culture forms an admirable addition to the Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture series and skillfully fulfills the series' mission of re-evaluating Victorian literature, culture, history, and identity through close readings. In many ways, Cove's work treads a well-established path. Countless British authors wrote about Italy during the Risorgimento, the movement for Italian independence and unification. An equal, if not greater, number of scholars have subsequently shown how these authors fashioned and refashioned their selfunderstanding through their relationship with and depictions of Italy. Cove provides a fresh take on this British obsession with Italy, however, by moving away from the most widely celebrated and studied authors, like Lord Byron, in favor of lesser-known and more marginal figures, such as Italian patriot and exile Giovanni Ruffini. Cove claims that the voices of these "outsiders and figures of cultural hybridity—women, expatriates, exiles, Anglo-Italians and Anglo-Irish"—reveal more about the contradictory and varied British responses to the Italian Risorgimento and related ongoing debates about "selfdetermination, citizenship and political rights" (23). The book is comprised of a general introduction, four case study chapters, and a brief conclusion. The chapters chronologically trace "four concrete, political focal points of British engagement with the Risorgimento" from the Congress of Vienna in 1815 to the creation in 1861 of the Kingdom of Italy, and they show how throughout this period British authors increased their engagement with the Italian present rather than its idealized past (21). Chapter 1 examines Lady Morgan's travelogue Italy (1821) and Mary Shelley's historical novel Valperga (1823). Cove argues that, unlike many of their fellow Romantic authors, who wrote about an abstract version of Italy and only cared about how Italian affairs impacted British politics, Morgan and Shelley were attentive to the specific historical and political realities of the Italian peninsula. Moreover, she claims, their status as outsiders made them more sensitive to issues of power and appreciative of Italy's resistance to the dominant post-1815 empires. [End Page 495] Chapters 2 and 3 move forward into the Victorian period, tracing the rise of leftwing Mazzinian politics, its eventual disappointment in the failed revolutions of 1848-9, and subsequent decline. In chapter 2, Cove focuses on two of Ruffini's English-language novels, Lorenzo Benoni (1853) and Doctor Antonio (1855), and reveals how Ruffini subverted the common trope of Italy as a place of exile, estrangement, and disorientation for British travelers by centering the sufferings of dispossessed Italian patriots instead. Chapter 3 then analyzes Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (1859-60) in relation to both the 1844 Post Office Espionage Scandal and the emergence of the sensation novel. Cove demonstrates how the British public's discovery that their government had been opening Mazzini's mail and sending its contents to continental authorities prompted a crisis of mid-Victorian liberalism and uncovered hidden continental-style despotism underneath the façade of British freedom and modernity. In a parallel fashion, she claims, sensation novels like The Woman in White brought the themes of the gothic novel home from historic settings and foreign shores to the contemporary British domestic sphere. The final chapter looks at the trauma surrounding the 1859 Second War of Independence through an examination of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Poems Before Congress (1860) and Last Poems (1862). Cove shows how Barrett Browning, who was supportive of the Risorgimento, also acknowledged the costs of unification and "the silences and erasures imposed through violent, historical change" (126). Finally, in the conclusion Cove offers a brief glimpse at the period after 1870, when the Italian state reclaimed control over the city of Rome, through the writings of authors like Henry James, Vernon Lee, and George Meredith; these works "demonstrate the extent to which politics infiltrated post-Risorgimento, aestheticised Italy" (164). Overall, this volume reveals the benefits of studying nationalist movements...