Backward glances

This study shows how, in the nineteenth century, Americans often described and narrated Italy as a way of reflecting on their own country and national identity in genres as various as travel literature, fiction, poetry, and journalism. Indeed, maintains author Leonardo Buonomo, Italy helped the Americans to relativize, if not redefine, the very idea of Americanness. The texts discussed here are James Fenimore Cooper's The Bravo (1831), Henry T. Tuckerman's The Italian Sketch Book (1835), Margaret Fuller's travel letters for The New York Tribune (1847-49), Julia Ward Howe's Passion Flowers (1854), Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun (1860), Henry P. Leland's Americans in Rome (1863), and William Dean Howells's Venetian Life (1866). Reading them as both literary and ethnographic documents, Buonomo contends that, although the texts were enjoyed primarily for their poetic vistas and panoramas, they also provided a running commentary on Italian customs and character.