English, Department of

 

Date of this Version

2011

Document Type

Article

Citation

The George Eliot Review 42 (2011)

Comments

Published by The George Eliot Review Online https://GeorgeEliotReview.org

Abstract

Two of the essays in this volume take George Eliot's Romola as their subject. Both reward attention, and they may be in danger of escaping deserved notice given the major concentration here on the life and writing of Dickens. This is the second of three publications projected by the organizers of a conference on 'Dickens, Victorian Culture, Italy', held in Genoa in 2007. The advance poster for the conference, still on the web, inadvertently does the book a slight disservice: 'At present', the organizers write, 'we are considering any or all of 1) A volume of the very best papers [see The Victorians and Italy: Literature, Travel, Politics, and Art, ed. Alessandro Vescovi, Luisa Villa, Paul Vita (Polymetrica, 2008)]; 2) A volume of papers [the present one] that are about Victorian writers and Italy, Dickens yes but others as well; and 3) A concentrated section of a future Dickens Studies Annual Volume." The quality of the individual pieces in Imagining Italy is rather better than this implied scooping up of remains after volume one. Admittedly, balance of coverage has not been a priority - 11 out of the 14 essays are primarily on Dickens; just the two on Eliot; and there is one impressively informed consideration, by Christine Alexander, of Italy’s role in the verbal and visual imagination of the young Charlotte Bronte. There is little effort at cross comparison (and to that extent the editors might have taken a heavier hand) but the quality of the individual pieces is high, and the contributions on Eliot, from Richard Bonfiglio and Robert M. Polhemus, gain more than they lose by their insertion into this very Dickens-centred discussion of Victorian engagements with Italian politics, religion, art and society.

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