Abstract
Cooper was the first American to produce a significant fictional treatment of Italy. In many ways Cooper, who spent two years in Italy, from 1828 to 1830, which he described in his Excursions in Italy (1838), might have been considered in the earlier chapter on the treatment of Italy by English novelists in the 1830s. The novels we shall mention were, in fact, first published in England and only subsequently in America; and it was from English literary models that Cooper built his own picture of Italy. His novel The Bravo. A Venetian Story (1831) developes the kind of literary material we have encountered in Lewis’s Bravo of Venice, to become the most vivid example in prose of the Byronic attitude to Venice.
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Chapter 12
For frequent minor references to Italy in Cooper’s later work, sec N. Wright, The American.Novelists in Italy: The Discoverers: Allston to James (Philadelphia,1965).
H. James, Hawthorne, ed. T. Tanner (London, 1967) p. 151
W. D. Howells, Roman Holidays & Others (New York, 1908) p. 226.
N. Hawthorne Marble Faun, Centenary Ed. (Ohio, 1968) pp. 411–2.
William Wetmore Story, Roba di Roma (London, 1863) vol. i, p. 7.
W. D. Howells Venetian Life (London, 1866) p. 186.
W. D. Howells Tuscan Cities (London, 1886) p. 9.
J. L. Woodress, Jr., Howells & Italy (Durham, North Carolina, 1952).
See H. James, Literary Reviews & Essays, ed. A. Mordell (New York, 1957) pp. 198–215.
H. James, Benvolio (1875), in Tales, ed. L. Edel, vol. iii (London, 1962), p. 391.
But interestingly, although there is no trace of him in their work, he was highly admired by the Brownings: see E. B. Browning, Letters ed. F. G. Kenyon (London, 1897), index, and Dearest Isa. Robert Browning’s Letters to Isabella Blagden cd. E. C. McAleer (Austin, Texas, 1951) p. 78, n. 2.
Collected by H. Martineau as Courrier Anglais (Paris, 1935–6);
see also G. Strickland (ed.), Selected Journalism From The English Reviews By Stendhal (London, 1959).
Henry James, Travelling Companions (1870) in Tales ed. L. Edel, vol. ii (London, 1962) pp. 184–5.
Cf. L. Edel, Henry James. The Untried Years, 1843–1870 (London, 1953) p. 306.
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© 1980 Kenneth Churchill
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Churchill, K. (1980). The American Novelists in Italy. In: Italy and English Literature 1764–1930. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-04642-3_12
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