| This study analyzes the ideological functions of Italy in early modern English writing. I argue that English authors consistently fashioned a multitude of imaginary locales called "Italy"--imaginary in that none reflected the political or cultural realities of the peninsula, and because they proceeded from a specifically English mixture of admiration and anxiety. Jacobean playwrights perhaps most obviously demonstrate this tendency to make "Italy" a staging ground for questions of national identity, but throughout the period, writers of historical, political, educational, moral and doctrinal works also used versions of "Italy" as convenient (and, I argue, necessary) opposites or analogues.;These "Italies" could function as models for personal conduct or civil society, but also as much darker threats to English political life, Protestantism, or the frequently vaunted capacity of the English to be direct and plain. Chapter One contrasts William Thomas's Historie of Italie (1549) with Roger Ascham's The Scholemaster (1570), locating in their differences two divergent traditions of representing Italy. Chapters Two and Three analyze the discourses of diet and of originary myths--the former in a range of imaginative and descriptive works, and the latter in Shakespeare's Cymbeline. Chapter Four examines Milton's ideological resistance to Venetian republicanism late in the Interregnum period, inside a tradition that includes, especially, James Harrington's Oceana (1656). The final chapter argues that Aphra Behn's The Rover (1670) and The Second Part of the Rover (1681) construct yet another imaginative Italy in order to reconstitute the royal exile and the interregnum as forms of recreational and educational "grand touring.".;As an account of "Italy" in its imaginative and polemical deployments from the first years of the English reformation through the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis, this project analyzes not only works usually considered high art, but also a number of other less-studied genres such as cookery books, herbals and dietaries, educational and historical treatises, political theory, religious polemic, language and conduct manuals, travel writing, and correspondence. I conclude that "Italy" proved not only uniquely useful but also necessary within the decades-long project of English national and cultural self-fashioning. |
