The Garden of the World: Victorian Visions of Italy

Dr. Stephen Tardif, University of St. Michael’s College

This presentation will offer an overview of the role that the Italian peninsula played in the imaginative geography of Victorian culture. At once a repository of cultural treasures as well as the redoubt of both backward (but alluring) religion and Mediterranean passion, Italy, for the Victorians, was simultaneously pagan, papist, and cosmopolitan. This talk will explore the dynamics of this Victorian form of “occidentalism,” with special attention to pivotal literary figures such as the Brownings and George Eliot.