The aim of the paper is to explore the representation of Renaissance Italy, in Vernon Lee’s Amour Dure (1887) and A Wedding Chest (1904). The paper will examine the two short stories in the context of Victorian descriptions of the Renaissance (from Ruskin to Pater) and Lee’s own critical essays (Euphorion, 1884; Renaissance Fancies and Studies, 1895) discussing the ways in which they reflect an extremely ambivalent relationship to the past. Lee’s Renaissance implies a meta-historical understanding of the Gothic as a form of reception of the Italian Renaissance exposing the ambivalence and the contradictions of the relationship between modernity and the “spurious ghost” of the past.
Vernon Lee and the Renaissance as Gothic at the Fin-de-Siècle
Farese, Carlotta
2020
Abstract
The aim of the paper is to explore the representation of Renaissance Italy, in Vernon Lee’s Amour Dure (1887) and A Wedding Chest (1904). The paper will examine the two short stories in the context of Victorian descriptions of the Renaissance (from Ruskin to Pater) and Lee’s own critical essays (Euphorion, 1884; Renaissance Fancies and Studies, 1895) discussing the ways in which they reflect an extremely ambivalent relationship to the past. Lee’s Renaissance implies a meta-historical understanding of the Gothic as a form of reception of the Italian Renaissance exposing the ambivalence and the contradictions of the relationship between modernity and the “spurious ghost” of the past.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
