From Mythos to Logos

FP = C HARLES DICKENS ADAMANTLY DECLARES he will not indulge in “any grave examination into the government or misgovernment of any portion” of Italy, because “that beautiful land” requires only aesthetic reflections that “have ever a fanciful and idle air” (1); and John Ruskin relentlessly insists on turning attention away from the action in the Italian streets and inward toward the motionless stones of buildings, because Venice, “Queen of Marble and of Mud,” has no political dimension (“Stones of Venice” 9: xxix). Elizabeth Barrett Browning, by contrast, masterfully tackles the problem of the emerging nation’s political image in Victorian England. These comments by prominent Victorian men of letters reflect the conventional British formulation of Italy through the nineteenth century “as the locus of the feminine and silent properties of space, painting, nature, and the body — a place outside of history where temporal motion had ceased” (Bailey 94). 1 Indeed, a commonplace implicit in the British definition of pre-national Italy is the idea of la bella Italia as apolitical and even ahistorical. But from 1815 onwards, as Italians became increasingly dissatisfied under their new Austrian rulers, the British equation between Italy and art, Italy and beauty, became increasingly out of touch with the Italian republican movement. 2

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Beauty · Liminality · Literature · MAGIC (telescope · Poetics · Poetry · Political science · Politics · Historical Art and Culture Studies · History · Law · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Modernist Literature and Criticism

• Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Woman and Artist

  Joyce Zonana, Helen Cooper•Tulsa Studies in Women s Literature•1990

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• Casa Guidi Windows and Aurora Leigh

  Dolores Rosenblum•Tulsa Studies in Women s Literature•1985

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• Poet

  Donald Davies, Donald A Davies et al.•Critical Inquiry•1982

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