ENGLISH LITERATURE

L-LIN/10 - 9 CFU - 2° Semester

Teaching Staff

MANUELA FORTUNATA D'AMORE

Learning Objectives

The main learning objectives of this course are: 1) presenting students with the main cultural and literary trends of late modern and contemporary Britain and Italy; 2) working on the relation between genre and gender, as well as national identity and otherness; 3) focusing on the main features of travel and migrant writing in Anglo-Italian contexts; 4) improving students’ use of text analysis and literary appreciation tools.


Course Structure

Both the course and the syllabus are divided into 2 modules: 1) Writing the Bel paese: Fiction and Travel (6 ECTS); 2) Italian Migrant Communities in Britain: Perceptions and Self-Perceptions (3 ECTS)

The course will be held in English. The materials that will be used in class, complete with the chosen works’ extracts, bibliographical references and audio-video materials, will be immediately made available in electronic form for those students who will not attend classes.


Detailed Course Content

Module A, Writing Italy: Fiction and Travel (6 ECTS), is centred on five XIX-XXI century English writers. The textual analysis and critical appreciation of pieces taken from Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens’s, E.M. Forster’s, Muriel Spark’s, and Jan Morris’s literary production are meant to draw the students’ attention to the way the Italian “other” has been represented until today.

Module B, Italian Migrant Communities in Britain: Perceptions and Self-Perceptions (3 ECTS), will focus on Joe Pieri, Anita Arcari, Mary Contini and Barbara O’Brien, second and third-generation Anglo-Italian contemporary writers, who have written about Italy in the past, also about their lives in the Italian communities in England, Scotland, and Wales. Their works will throw light both on the history of Italian migration to Britain from 1860 to in post-war years and the concepts of “perception” and “self-perception”.


Textbook Information

A. Writing Italy: Fiction and Travel (6 ECTS)

Erasmus and international students will study the given extracts materials and will read two of the listed works:

Students will also study the critical essays related to the two classics that they have chosen to read:

Moskal, Jeanne, Travel Writing, in Esther Schor, The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 242-258.

Walchester Kathryn, ‘Our Own Fair Italy’: Nineteenth-Century Women’s Travels and Italy 1800-1844, Oxford and Berlin, Peter Lang, 2007, pp. 203-235.

Vescovi Alessandro, “Themes and Styles in Pictures from Italy”, in Luisa Conti Camaiora (ed.), English Travel & Travellers, Milano, ISU, 2002, pp. 96-106.

Buzard James Michael, “Forster's Trespasses: Tourism and Cultural Politics”, Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 34, No. 2, 1988, pp. 155-179

Peat Alexandra, “Modern Pilgrimage and the Authority of Space in Forster's A Room with a View and Woolf's The Voyage Out, An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, Vol. 36, No. 4, 2003, pp. 139-153.

MacKay Marina, “Muriel Spark and the Meaning of Treason”, Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 54, No. 3, 2008, pp. 505-522.

Adams Tim, “Jan Morris: ‘You’re talking to someone at the very end of things’”, The Guardian, 1 March 2020

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/mar/01/jan-morris-thinking-again-interview-youre-talking-to-someone-at-the-very-end-of-things

Fenwick Gillian, Traveling Genius: The Writing Life of Jan Morris, Columbia, The University of South Carolina Press, 2008, pp. 1-31.

 

Those who have little or no knowledge of XIX-XX century English literature may also want to consult

Blamires Harry, A Short History of English Literature, London, Rouledge, 2013, pp. 231-423.

 

The relevant information about the above-mentioned authors and works will be found in the PPT presentation that will also be made available in electronic form.

 

Methodology

Erasmus and international students will study

Tim Youngs, The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013, pp. 50-177.

 

B. Italian Migrant Communities in Modern Britain: Perceptions and Self-Perceptions (3 ECTS)

 

For this module, Erasmus and international students will work on the given extracts and will read one of the following:

The relevant information about the above-mentioned authors and works will be found in the PPT presentation that will also be made available in electronic form.

 

Methodology

Erasmus and international students will study



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