Rambles in the Tuscan Fields: Janet Ross’s and Vernon Lee’s Sketches of Places
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.4454/syn.v1.371Keywords:
Anglo-Italian Studies, Landscape, Sketch, Cultural MemoryAbstract
Between the mid-nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, Tuscany was home to an intellectually vibrant Anglo-American community. Unsurprisingly, the region was the subject of a number of travelogues by English and American ‘expatriates’, that is, observing subjects whose gaze is simultaneously placed within and without the landscape and the culture that they explore. This article examines the work of British-born, expatriate writers Janet Ross and Vernon Lee, and argues that their travel memoirs represent Tuscan landscapes as a blotting paper conflating culture and the environment. Ross’s Italian Sketches (1887) and Old Florence and Modern Tuscany (1904) and Lee’sThe Enchanted Woods (1905) and The Tower of the Mirrors (1914) appropriate the conventions of visual and verbal sketches to blur the distinction between environment and landscape on the one hand, and between objective descriptions and subjective impressions on the other. In so doing, Ross’s andLee’s representations of Tuscan landscapes rest on an imbrication of visual and verbal elements that foreground the interplay of individual and cultural memory.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
During the 24 months following their date of publication, articles’ files are available for download only on subscription. After the embargo period, contents will be freely accessible in compliance with the Creative Commons Generic Licence version 4.0 (cc. By 4.0). From the date of publication and during the embargo period, the copyright of each article is owned by the publisher. At the end of the embargo, the work’s copyright reverts to the author.
As a rule, the journal does not charge authors for the publication of their articles.
However, if an author wishes to request immediate Open Access publication of his/her contribution, without waiting for the end of the embargo period, a fee of EUR 500,00 will be charged. In order to request this option, please contact our administrative office (amministrazione@edizioniets.com) and the journal manager (journals@edizioniets.com) indicating: the title of your article, the details of the issue in which it appears, the details of the person to whom the invoice should be addressed, and whether references to research funding should be made.
