The Artistry of Exile
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This book explores the ways in which exile concentrates the aesthetics of two generations of 19th-century British writers who felt forced to leave England and chose to live in Italy. The study responds to recurrent issues raised at Romantic research seminars in Scotland: Richard Cronin drew attention to the oddity that the two English poets who responded most directly to the politics of England in 1819 wrote from abroad; Nigel Leask queried whether exile in Italy could be counted as real exile compared with transportation to Australia; and Dale Townsend asked about the relationship between exile and cosmopolitanism. Matthew Roe reformulated the original research question in Venice in 2009 when he asked (with some asperity) why Lord Byron wrote so much poetry in a place where everyone else just went on holiday.
The book also enters broader debates shaped by recent monographs on travel writing; the Italian literary inheritance in English literature; the ‘vitality of reading for form’; and discussions of the importance of Italy for the English political imagination.1 In many former studies, Italy becomes synonymous with an idealized destination, the end point of a quest for differently imagined freedoms of a political, aesthetic, or sexual nature. The present book is more interested in the aesthetic tensions and juxtapositions in the dialogue between two nations and cultures, rather than la bella figura of psycho-sexual liberation or Risorgimento politics. My intellectual debts are, therefore, mainly to critics and editors who have focused on the formal and philosophical ramifications of travel to and residence in Italy for English writers.
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