Dickens and Italy

Little Dorrit and Pictures from Italy

Edited By: Marialuisa Bignami, Michael Hollington

£39.99

Dickens's relationship with America has been amply studied, his no less important relationship to Italy much less so. His stay there represented ‘the turning-point of his career.’ This book focuses on his major Italian writings, Pictures from Italy and Little Dorrit.

‘Dickens and America’ has been amply studied, his no less important relationship to Italy much less so, despite his friend Forster's assertion that his long…

‘Dickens and America’ has been amply studied, his no less important relationship to Italy much less so, despite his friend Forster’s assertion that his long stay in Genoa represented ‘the turning-point of his career.’ This book, arising from a major conference held in Genoa in 2007, attempts to redress the balance, focusing primarily on Dickens’s two major writings about Italy—the travel book Pictures from Italy of 1845, and Part Two of his great novel Little Dorrit of 1855–7. It falls into six sections: the first concerns Dickens’s enjoyment of leisure for the first time in his life in Italy; the second, his response to the visual attractions of Italy, both natural and artistic; the third, his political stance about Italy in the period of the Risorgimento; the fourth, his preoccupation with death and decay in what he saw and experienced in Italy; the fifth, his representation of ‘Italianness’ in Little Dorrit and elsewhere; and the sixth, his relation to modern and contemporary writers about Italy. It thus aims to fill a vital gap in Dickens studies.

Michael Hollington was for many years Professor of English at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and has also taught extensively in France, England and elsewhere. He has been a Dickens enthusiast since childhood, has published many books and articles on his favourite author (including Dickens and the Grotesque and studies of David Copperfield and Great Expectations), and edited the four volume anthology of Dickens criticism in the Critical Assessments series. He is currently editing the two volume Reception of Charles Dickens in Europe.

Francesca Orestano is Associate Professor of English Literature at the State University of Milan. She works on the connections between literature and aesthetics, the picturesque and visual culture, modernism, children’s literature, landscape gardening, and the gothic. Her recent publications include essays on Dickens and the magic lantern, Ruskin, Jakob Burckhardt, Virginia Woolf, and an edited book, Strange Sisters: Literature and Aesthetics in the Nineteenth Century (Peter Lang, 2009).