"But lovers and hunters of the picturesque, let us not keep too studiously out of view the miserable depravity, degradation, and wretchedness, with which this gay Naepolitan life is inseparably associated. It is not well to find Saint Giles’s so repulsive and the Porta Capuana so attractive." (C. Dickens, Pictures from Italy, 1846) "After all, the native of Cotrone has advantages over the native of a city slum; and it is better to die in a hovel by the Ionian Sea than in a cellar at Shoreditch." (G. Gissing, By the Ionian Sea. Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy, 1901) Starting from these quotations, I propose a comparison between representations of Naples (and more in general of the Italian South) in Dickens’s and Gissing’s books on Italy. They are both travelogues, belonging to the glorious tradition of a much studied narrative genre, that of the Grand Tour, within which a special interest in Mediterranean countries, and in Southern Italy in particular, developed and flourished from the mid-nineteenth century to the early decades of the twentieth, to the point that it is legitimate to speak, in these years, of a proper “Mediterranean passion” among the British, as witnessed by a remarkable number of travel books (J. Pemble, The Mediterranean Passion). In the case of Pictures from Italy and By the Ionian Sea, not only is the subject matter partly the same, but also the attitudes of their authors are in some ways similar. What is more relevant, in this context, is the existence of a deep literary kinship between the two; Gissing was, in fact, Dickens’s most direct follower as well as the first Victorian novelist to seriously evaluate his work (Charles Dickens. A Critical Study, 1898; Prefaces to some of Dickens’s novels for publication in the Rochester Edition, later collected in a separate volume, The Immortal Dickens, 1925; the abridged and revised edition of John Forster’s Life of Dickens, 1903). In my talk, I shall first deal with the main literary devices and techniques deployed by Dickens in his pages about Naples (theatricality and excess), and the narrative strategies he adopts (pathos, bathos and the grotesque), and then present Gissing’s relationship with Southern Italy (which, including Naples, he visited three times), underlining the meaning of landscape and of the vestiges of the classical past in By the Ionian Sea. In attempting a comparison between the two writers’ views of Naples and of the Italian South, my intention is to look beyond the different specific ideals projected in their images of this culture, and “to consider the desideratum they clearly share, namely alterity as such, a recognition of distance and difference from the familiar.” (J. Buzard, The Beaten Track).
Pictures from Naples in Dickens's and Gissing's Italian Books
CHIALANT, Maria Teresa
2010-01-01
Abstract
"But lovers and hunters of the picturesque, let us not keep too studiously out of view the miserable depravity, degradation, and wretchedness, with which this gay Naepolitan life is inseparably associated. It is not well to find Saint Giles’s so repulsive and the Porta Capuana so attractive." (C. Dickens, Pictures from Italy, 1846) "After all, the native of Cotrone has advantages over the native of a city slum; and it is better to die in a hovel by the Ionian Sea than in a cellar at Shoreditch." (G. Gissing, By the Ionian Sea. Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy, 1901) Starting from these quotations, I propose a comparison between representations of Naples (and more in general of the Italian South) in Dickens’s and Gissing’s books on Italy. They are both travelogues, belonging to the glorious tradition of a much studied narrative genre, that of the Grand Tour, within which a special interest in Mediterranean countries, and in Southern Italy in particular, developed and flourished from the mid-nineteenth century to the early decades of the twentieth, to the point that it is legitimate to speak, in these years, of a proper “Mediterranean passion” among the British, as witnessed by a remarkable number of travel books (J. Pemble, The Mediterranean Passion). In the case of Pictures from Italy and By the Ionian Sea, not only is the subject matter partly the same, but also the attitudes of their authors are in some ways similar. What is more relevant, in this context, is the existence of a deep literary kinship between the two; Gissing was, in fact, Dickens’s most direct follower as well as the first Victorian novelist to seriously evaluate his work (Charles Dickens. A Critical Study, 1898; Prefaces to some of Dickens’s novels for publication in the Rochester Edition, later collected in a separate volume, The Immortal Dickens, 1925; the abridged and revised edition of John Forster’s Life of Dickens, 1903). In my talk, I shall first deal with the main literary devices and techniques deployed by Dickens in his pages about Naples (theatricality and excess), and the narrative strategies he adopts (pathos, bathos and the grotesque), and then present Gissing’s relationship with Southern Italy (which, including Naples, he visited three times), underlining the meaning of landscape and of the vestiges of the classical past in By the Ionian Sea. In attempting a comparison between the two writers’ views of Naples and of the Italian South, my intention is to look beyond the different specific ideals projected in their images of this culture, and “to consider the desideratum they clearly share, namely alterity as such, a recognition of distance and difference from the familiar.” (J. Buzard, The Beaten Track).I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
