Roman Holidays

American Writers and Artists in Nineteenth-Century Italy

Robert K. Martin, Leland S. Person, Robert K. Martin, Leland S. Person

• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9781587293856, 9780877457824
• eBook ISBN: 9781587294044
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Inroduction by Robert K. Martin and Leland S. Person
• Where Is Hawthorne’s Rome? By Richard H. Millington
• ‘‘An Awful Freedom’’: Hawthorne and the Anxieties of the Carnival by Robert K. Martin 28
• Fauns and Mohicans: Narratives of Extinction and Hawthorne’s Aesthetic of Modernity by Kristie Hamilton
• The Purloined Studio: The Woman Sculptor as Phallic Ghost in Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun by Nancy Proctor
• 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 by John Carlos Rowe
• Falling into Heterosexuality: Sculpting Male Bodies in The Marble Faun and Roderick Hudson by Leland S. Person
• Roman Springs and Roman Fevers: James, Gender, and Transnational Dis-ease by Priscilla L. Walton
• Henry James’s Italian Hours and the ‘‘Ruskinian Contagion’’ by Adam Parkes
• Fuller, Hawthorne, and Imagining Urban Spaces in Rome by Brigitte Bailey
• The Black Robe of Romance: Hawthorne’s Shadow and Howells’s Italian Priest by Susan M. Griffin
• ‘‘The Connecting Link of Centuries’’: Melville, Rome, and the Mediterranean, 1856–1857 by Robert Milder
• Road to Africa: Frederick Douglass’s Rome by Robert S. Levine
• Contributors
• Index