Critical studies have frequently acknowledged the nineteenth-century American fascination with Italy, but none specifically examines the impact of Italy on American women’s writing. A number of nineteenth-century women were privileged and daring enough to travel abroad, using a range of genres to respond discursively to their new surroundings. Annamaria Formichella Elsden’s study groups six women, whose writings were shaped by their encounters with Italy, to investigate women’s attempts to leave behind the domestic, in all the senses of that term. Popular nineteenth-century portrayals of women abroad often fell into two categories: the overly assertive “feminist” and the hyper-feminine lady. Texts about Italy by American women move beyond these stereotypes. The author acknowledges that women wrote beyond the narrow boundaries ascribed to them by too much criticism. Elsden argues that the work of these women, which included Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Sophia Peabody Hawthorne’s travel writings, Margaret Fuller’s news dispatches, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Agnes of Sorrento, and Constance Fenimore Woolson’s and Edith Wharton’s short stories, challenged American individualist ideology while contributing to the patriotic rhetorical tradition. |