The romance of Italy and the English political imagination

In blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction, diplomats and travelers, and English and Italian concepts of nation, Maura O'Connor shows us the extent to which imagination, pleasure, and politics were intimately interwoven in the English middle-class's fascination with the Italian peninsula from the early 1800s through the 1860s.

O'Connor uses a variety of sources, ranging from travel writings and the popular press to diplomatic dispatches and official correspondence, to illustrate how influential the romance of Italy was to the bourgeois, liberal, and, above all, English social order during a time when class society was undergoing reconfiguration.