Roman Holidays: American Writers and Artists in Nineteenth-Century Italy
edited by Robert K. Martin and Leland S. Person
University of Iowa Press, 2001 Cloth: 978-0-87745-782-4 | eISBN: 978-1-58729-404-4 | Paper: 978-1-58729-385-6 Library of Congress Classification PS159.I8R66 2002 Dewey Decimal Classification 810.9003
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Featuring essays by twelve prominent American literature scholars, Roman Holidaysexplores the tradition of American travel to Italy and makes a significant contribution to the understanding of nineteenth-century American encounters with Italian culture and, more specifically, with Rome.
The increase in American travel to Italy during the nineteenth century was partly a product of improved conditions of travel. As suggested in the title, Italy served nineteenth-century writers and artists as a kind of laboratory site for encountering Others and “other” kinds of experience. No doubt Italy offered a place of holiday—a momentary escape from the familiar—but the journey to Rome, a place urging upon the visitor a new and more complex sense of history, also forced a reexamination of oneself and one's identity. Writers and artists found their religious, political, and sexual assumptions challenged.
Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun has a prominent place in this collection: as Henry James commented in his study of Hawthorne, the book was “part of the intellectual equipment of the Anglo-Saxon visitor to Rome.” The essayists also examine works by James, Fuller, Melville, Douglass, Howells, and other writers as well as such sculptors as Hiram Powers, William Wetmore Story, and Harriet Hosmer.
Bringing contemporary concerns about gender, race, and class to bear upon nineteenth-century texts, Roman Holidays is an especially timely contribution to nineteenth-century American studies.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Robert Martin is professor of English and chair of the department at the Université de Montréal.
REVIEWS
“Roman Holidays is an impressive collection. These essays offer a broad and refreshing range of perspectives on Italy as a space of provocative and productive otherness in the U.S. cultural imaginary of the nineteenth century. Familiar figures such as Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, James, and Howells come in for original treatment, as do authors less frequently associated with Italy, like Melville and Frederick Douglass and such important sculptors as Harriet Hosmer, Hiram Powers, Horatio Greenough, and William Wetmore Story. Abundant dialogue with the best recent scholarship further distinguishes this valuable volume.”—Eric Haralson, author of Henry James and Queer Modernity
“…[an] illuminating critical collection…The essays in this collection dovetail very nicely in their questions, use of evidence, and implications, and the issues they raise are well worth attending to…In looking closely at how a number of readers used their experience in Italy to ruminate on the gendered and racial implications of being American, Roman Holidays brings to mind the question of what exactly may have been at stake for the nineteenth-century traveler who thought to take to heart another old, familiar saying: ‘When in Rome [. . .].’”—Henry James Review
TABLE OF CONTENTS
RICHARD H. MILLINGTON 9
Where Is Hawthorne's Rome?
The Marble Faun and the Cultural Space of Middle-Class Leisure
ROBERT K. MARTIN 28
"An Awful Freedom":
Hawthorne and the Anxieties of the Carnival
KRISTIE HAMILTON 41
Fauns and Mohicans:
Narratives of Extinction and Hawthorne's Aesthetic of Modernity
NANCY PROCTOR 60
The Purloined Studio:
The Woman Sculptor as Phallic Ghost in Hawthorne's The Marble Faun
JOHN CARLOS ROWE 73
Hawthorne's Ghost in James's Italy:
Sculptural Form, Romantic Narrative, and the Function of Sexuality
in The Marble Faun, "Adina," and William Wetmore Story and His Friends
LELAND S. PERSON 107
Falling into Heterosexuality:
Sculpting Male Bodies in The Marble Faun and Roderick Hudson
PRISCILLA L. WALTON 140
Roman Springs and Roman Fevers:
James, Gender, and Transnational Dis-ease
ADAM PARKES 159
Henry James's Italian Hours and the "Ruskinian Contagion"
BRIGITTE BAILEY I75
Fuller, Hawthorne, and Imagining Urban Spaces in Rome
SUSAN M. GRIFFIN 191
The Black Robe of Romance:
Hawthorne's Shadow and Howells's Italian Priest
ROBERT MILDER 206
"The Connecting Link of Centuries":
Melville, Rome, and the Mediterranean, 1 8S , 6 8S 7
ROBERT S. LEVINE 226
Road to Africa: Frederick Douglass's Rome
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Roman Holidays: American Writers and Artists in Nineteenth-Century Italy
edited by Robert K. Martin and Leland S. Person
University of Iowa Press, 2001 Cloth: 978-0-87745-782-4 eISBN: 978-1-58729-404-4 Paper: 978-1-58729-385-6
Featuring essays by twelve prominent American literature scholars, Roman Holidaysexplores the tradition of American travel to Italy and makes a significant contribution to the understanding of nineteenth-century American encounters with Italian culture and, more specifically, with Rome.
The increase in American travel to Italy during the nineteenth century was partly a product of improved conditions of travel. As suggested in the title, Italy served nineteenth-century writers and artists as a kind of laboratory site for encountering Others and “other” kinds of experience. No doubt Italy offered a place of holiday—a momentary escape from the familiar—but the journey to Rome, a place urging upon the visitor a new and more complex sense of history, also forced a reexamination of oneself and one's identity. Writers and artists found their religious, political, and sexual assumptions challenged.
Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun has a prominent place in this collection: as Henry James commented in his study of Hawthorne, the book was “part of the intellectual equipment of the Anglo-Saxon visitor to Rome.” The essayists also examine works by James, Fuller, Melville, Douglass, Howells, and other writers as well as such sculptors as Hiram Powers, William Wetmore Story, and Harriet Hosmer.
Bringing contemporary concerns about gender, race, and class to bear upon nineteenth-century texts, Roman Holidays is an especially timely contribution to nineteenth-century American studies.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Robert Martin is professor of English and chair of the department at the Université de Montréal.
REVIEWS
“Roman Holidays is an impressive collection. These essays offer a broad and refreshing range of perspectives on Italy as a space of provocative and productive otherness in the U.S. cultural imaginary of the nineteenth century. Familiar figures such as Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, James, and Howells come in for original treatment, as do authors less frequently associated with Italy, like Melville and Frederick Douglass and such important sculptors as Harriet Hosmer, Hiram Powers, Horatio Greenough, and William Wetmore Story. Abundant dialogue with the best recent scholarship further distinguishes this valuable volume.”—Eric Haralson, author of Henry James and Queer Modernity
“…[an] illuminating critical collection…The essays in this collection dovetail very nicely in their questions, use of evidence, and implications, and the issues they raise are well worth attending to…In looking closely at how a number of readers used their experience in Italy to ruminate on the gendered and racial implications of being American, Roman Holidays brings to mind the question of what exactly may have been at stake for the nineteenth-century traveler who thought to take to heart another old, familiar saying: ‘When in Rome [. . .].’”—Henry James Review
TABLE OF CONTENTS
RICHARD H. MILLINGTON 9
Where Is Hawthorne's Rome?
The Marble Faun and the Cultural Space of Middle-Class Leisure
ROBERT K. MARTIN 28
"An Awful Freedom":
Hawthorne and the Anxieties of the Carnival
KRISTIE HAMILTON 41
Fauns and Mohicans:
Narratives of Extinction and Hawthorne's Aesthetic of Modernity
NANCY PROCTOR 60
The Purloined Studio:
The Woman Sculptor as Phallic Ghost in Hawthorne's The Marble Faun
JOHN CARLOS ROWE 73
Hawthorne's Ghost in James's Italy:
Sculptural Form, Romantic Narrative, and the Function of Sexuality
in The Marble Faun, "Adina," and William Wetmore Story and His Friends
LELAND S. PERSON 107
Falling into Heterosexuality:
Sculpting Male Bodies in The Marble Faun and Roderick Hudson
PRISCILLA L. WALTON 140
Roman Springs and Roman Fevers:
James, Gender, and Transnational Dis-ease
ADAM PARKES 159
Henry James's Italian Hours and the "Ruskinian Contagion"
BRIGITTE BAILEY I75
Fuller, Hawthorne, and Imagining Urban Spaces in Rome
SUSAN M. GRIFFIN 191
The Black Robe of Romance:
Hawthorne's Shadow and Howells's Italian Priest
ROBERT MILDER 206
"The Connecting Link of Centuries":
Melville, Rome, and the Mediterranean, 1 8S , 6 8S 7
ROBERT S. LEVINE 226
Road to Africa: Frederick Douglass's Rome
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
It can take 2-3 weeks for requests to be filled.
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE