Le Mezzogiorno des écrivains européens/Europeans Writing the Mezzogiorno ed. by Béatrice Bijon, et al

Abstract

204 Reviews Shakespeare' by one reviewer (and not approvingly!), is discussed byMegan Con way as a chauvinist epic, which failed on the stage in part because of the authors vigorous stand against the execution of Louis XVI. When Dumouriez defected to theAustrians later in 1793, an 'unfortunate choice of protagonists', as Conway puts it (p. 235) saw de Gouge herself condemned to the guillotine. The French Revo lution provides Madelyn Gurtwith with two further occasions to discuss women's agency: Chenier's play about Charles IX which associated Marie-Antoinette ne gatively with theMedici, and Francois Chabot versus Claire Lacombe in a fierce rhetorical clash.What Gutwith calls 'small but smoldering' (p. 237) moments par ticularize the expulsion ofwomen from public life in republic and monarchy That sets up nicely the final essay, by Barbara Ann Day-Hickman, on de StaeT's relations with du Pont de Nemours, a fellow liberal and friendwho proved unsympathetic about her exile and her troubles; tactlessly he wrote thathe wished he had her time to study. Contributors to the collection mostly assume a liberalism inwhich agency is self-evidently a goal. At times one would likemore examination of that premiss. Some contributors historicize itexplicitly; some do not. The editor pays tribute in the preface to Betty Rizzo, scholar of eighteenth-century women and editor of the letters of Frances Greville. Part of Rizzo's edition appeared in volume iv; I hope that futurevolumes will accommodate the rest, as originally planned. Itwould be a further indication of the valuable contingency ofwomen's life, work, and culture, and a celebration of agency in the form ofwomen's studies. King's College London Clare Brant LeMezzogiorno des ecrivains europeens/Europeans Writing the Mezzogiorno. Ed. by Beatrice Biion, Yves Clavaron, and Bernard Dieterle. Saint-Etienne: Publications de l'Universite de Saint-Etienne. 2006. ix+289 pp. 35. ISBN 978-2-86272-430-0. Foreign writers' perception of the Italian Mezzogiorno, broadly the South, from Naples to Sicily, has always been intriguing and inmany ways fascinating. The Mezzogiorno can be a mythical land, evoking a glorious and often romanticized classical past, an imaginary land of seduction and passion, but also a land which raises ancestral fears because itvery often came to represent the 'unknown'. Visit ing this area of Italywas for a long time a crucial part of theGrand Tour, aimed at refining, enriching, and broadening the cultural horizons of many Northern European writers and artists. But at the same time such exposure to the exoti cism of theMezzogiorno too often reconfirmed age-old prejudices. The historical consequences of centuries of poverty and deprivation, themenacing presence of brigands, the idea of an endemic moral and political corruption, matched by a merciless climate, all contributed to a demonization of the South alongside its more romantic images. This volume, through a collection of stimulating essays written by a team of international scholars, explores various perceptions of the MLR, 105.1, 2010 205 Mezzogiorno in thewritings of several writers. The articles span two centuries, from theEnlightment to post-1945, giving us therefore the opportunity to compare the development, or even the persistence, of such perceptions. One area of anxiety in the exposure to Italian Southern culture is the close link between religion and superstition. Tad Tuleja explores the reaction of the eighteenth-century Scottish travelwriter Patrick Brydone to this type of religion in his Tour through Sicily and Malta of 1773, a book which, as Tuleja underlines, 'transformed Sicily from a negligible backwater to an exotic locale that the smart setwas almost obliged tovisit' (p. 32). Interestingly,despite his empirical mind and instinctive distaste for superstitious peasants' practices, Brydone seems perversely attracted to them as if'hungry for sensations'. As Tuleja again observes, his account of the journey is pervaded by a strong sense of voyeurism so that such practices are no more than the dramatization of his own longing 'forthe immediacy thathis more abstract faith denies him' (p. 37). His travel journal, then, tells us a lot about thewriter himself, so that the South seems to offerBrydone a vehicle to articulate a host of repressed feelings. The 'voluptuousness' of the South returns in the travel journals of Alexandre Dumas pere and...