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Tuscan Spaces
Literary Constructions of Space
Silvia M. Ross (Author)
9781487526269
Paperback / softback, published 7 August 2020
208 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.34 kg
‘This book presents readers with a number of innovative representations of the region… A well written and interesting book that provides historical context and geographical specificity to a subject that has long engaged writers, directors, tourists, and literary theorists.’
An important locus for English-speaking writers, the region of Tuscany is also well represented in the Italian literary canon. In Tuscan Spaces, Silvia Ross focuses on constructions of Tuscany in twentieth-century Italian literature and juxtaposes them with English prose works by such authors as E.M. Forster and Frances Mayes to expose the complexity of literary representation centred on a single milieu. Ross uses the works of writers such as Federigo Tozzi, Aldo Palazzeschi, Vasco Pratolini, and Elena Gianini Belotti, to seek out alternative visions of Tuscan space and emphasizes that each author fashions the region in a manner which reflects their personal poetics, background, and experiences. Theories of cultural geography, space, travel, and narrative contribute to Ross's consideration of the dualisms commonly employed in writings about Tuscany, such as country/city, nature/culture, female/male, and self/other, all of which are in turn affected by her interrogation of the local/foreign opposition that underlies the study as a whole.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
iv
List of Illustrations
v
Introduction
1
1. The Country and the City: Vertigo and Legendary Psychasthenia
in Tozzi's Tuscany 31
2. Palazzeschi's Spaces of Difference: The Materassi Sisters at the Window
78
3. Vasco Pratolini's Florentine Spaces of Exclusion
119
4. The Stendhal Syndrome, or The Horror of Being Foreign in Florence
162
5. 'Going Native': Tuscan Houses and Italian Others in Contemporary
American Travel Writing 219
6. The Tuscan Countryside: Nature and the (Non)Domestic in
Elena Gianini Belotti 260
Afterword: Further Tuscan Spaces of Alterity
298
Works Cited
307