The Warm South: How the Mediterranean Shaped the British Imagination by Robert Holland

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Warm South: How the Mediterranean Shaped the British Imagination by Robert Holland Precious McKenzie (bio) The Warm South: How the Mediterranean Shaped the British Imagination by Robert Holland; pp. 317. Yale UP, 2018. $33.05 cloth. Robert holland's The Warm South: How the Mediterranean Shaped the British Imagination is an expansive, captivating analysis of European art, politics, and attitudes. Holland takes canonical British authors and illuminates the ways in which they were engaging in larger European issues of their time. Unlike other scholars of British writers, Holland no longer silos these writers in Britain but shows how far their travels extended beyond Great Britain. He examines how their travels in the Mediterranean influenced their personal lives and their creative works. Holland begins the book in 1822, with Lord Byron, Edward Trelawny, and Percy Bysshe Shelley's corpse on the beach at Viareggio, Italy. He situates these Romantics, as well as Mary Shelley and John Keats, at the centre of Britain's growing fascination with Italy and Greece. The Mediterranean, as Holland finds, is flexible and is able to reflect, like a prism, a traveller's hopes, desires, and anxieties. Holland maintains that the Britons who travelled to the Mediterranean "were almost wholly preoccupied with discovering themselves, and their purposes were defined in terms of their own lives and contexts" (18). From this premise, he offers a range of examples, moving from Byron and the Shelleys to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Benjamin Disraeli, Fanny Trollope, John Ruskin, and John Henry Newman, to name but a few. Holland's scope and depth is astounding. From the Victorian era, he moves deftly into the modern era, including discussions of Ernest Hemingway and T.S. Eliot, and then on to the filmmakers of the 1960s. Holland leaves no stone unturned, connecting literature, painting, architecture, opera, and politics to show how embedded the Mediterranean was in the British imagination. One of the many strengths of this book is Holland's commitment to connecting political uprisings and wars to the creative work being done during the period. He underscores the unique challenges, ideological and physical, that Napoleon's military campaigns created for British travellers to the Continent. Holland does not paint a rosy image of the Mediterranean of warm days spent in sun-drenched olive groves. Instead, he deftly balances the dreamlike experiences of travellers to the Mediterranean with more sinister experiences. He acknowledges that for some British travellers, the Mediterranean was the first place where they encountered extreme poverty. The Mediterranean, for others, represented a place of sexual fantasies and moral transgressions, and for some Protestants, the influence of the Catholic Church in Spain and Italy felt pervasive.While some Britons idealized, fetishized, or exoticized the Mediterranean, others satirized the region. Holland uses the example of Oscar Wilde and dress reform to illustrate this intellectual divide. For Wilde, [End Page 162] ancient Greek fashion symbolized a healthier, more functional mode of dress than corsets and large skirts (179). Wilde induced his friend—the mistress of the Prince of Wales, Lillie Langtry—"to adopt classical interests" (179). Langtry learned Latin and appeared at various social events in Greek dresses. W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan then poked fun at Wilde and Langtry in their operetta Patience (180). During the late nineteenth century, the idealizations of the past were called into question as Britons gained more scientific, archaeological evidence of how ancient Greek society functioned—a society in which women had lesser status and slave ownership was allowed (181). Holland analyzes the competing attitudes toward the Mediterranean, focusing on the fluidity of British sentiments as the times changed. In sum, Holland's book excels at drawing connections between the political and the artistic. The book delves deeply into networks of writers and artists, illustrating how extensive their travels were and how divided their sentiments toward the region were in comparison to their experiences at home in Britain. The Warm South leads readers into reflections on globalism and nativism, issues that are of particular relevance to our contemporary world. Precious McKenzie Rocky Mountain College Precious McKenzie PRECIOUS MCKENZIE is an associate professor of English at Rocky Mountain College, in...