The essays offered in this book explore some of the significant Romantic and post-Romantic constructions of Italy, its culture and history, beginning with Madame de Stael's seminal Corinne, ou l'Italie (1807), which would prove influential in the aesthetic imagery shaping and surrounding subsequent literary works about Italy. The Italian landscape and cultural scene invited both description and re-inscription by some of the prominent British writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who were responding to the fascination exerted upon them by Italian culture generally. The chapters in this book consider the rich texture of this scene of literary and cultural influence, focusing on the perception, representation and appropriation of Italy by some major British writers of the period indicated, among them Lord Byron, Lady Morgan, Percy Shelley, John Keats, George Eliot, John Ruskin, E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence and W.B. Yeats.

Oliver Friggieri is Professor of Maltese Literature at the University of Malta, and he is the foremost Maltese literary critic and a national author. He has published extensively and in his creative writing he attempts to intepret the sentiments and attitudes of a people living in the Central Mediterranean. The Essential Oliver Friggieri includes some translated works and implies that the selection is representative of Friggieri’s feelings, thoughts, and mind style in the source culture. It projects a compact, coherent image of him as a relevant contemporary national author: that is, as it embodies an image of some of his most characteristic works, the selection, with no particular arrangement in mind, tends to stabilise the sense among non-Maltese receptor readers of what constitutes the relevant literary output of Friggieri in a modern environment. Through the medium of literature Friggieri assumes the role of the conscience of a nation. He proclaims in traditional positive elements in his longer poetic works, but expresses present negative qualities in his ficton. His prose is not a weapon for war but a cry for justice and honesty. It is simple enough to retain the common readers’ attention and intriguing enough to involve their thinking.