Authors in Dialogue

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche
Nationalbibliothek. Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche National-bibliografie; detailed
bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Names: Marucci, Franco, 1949- author.

Title: Authors in dialogue : comparative essays in nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century English literature / Franco Marucci.

Description: Oxford ; New York : Peter Lang, [2020] | Includes
bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2019058476 (print) | LCCN 2019058477 (ebook) | ISBN
9781789975987 (hardback) | ISBN 9781789975994 (ebook) | ISBN
9781789976007 (epub) | ISBN 9781789976014 (mobi)

Subjects: LCSH: English literature--19th century--History and criticism. |
English literature--20th century--History and criticism.

Classification: LCC PR463 .M37 2020 (print) | LCC PR463 (ebook) | DDC
820.9/008--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019058476

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019058477

Cover image: Frederic Leighton, Study at a Reading Desk (1877). Oil on canvas. In the
public domain.

Cover design by Brian Melville.

ISBN 978-1-78997-598-7 (print) • ISBN 978-1-78997-599-4 (ePDF)

ISBN 978-1-78997-600-7 (ePub) • ISBN 978-1-78997-601-4 (mobi)

© Peter Lang AG 2020

Published by Peter Lang Ltd, International Academic Publishers,

52 St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3LU, United Kingdom

oxford@peterlang.com, www.peterlang.com

Franco Marucci has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,
1988, to be identified as Author of this Work.

All rights reserved.

All parts of this publication are protected by copyright.

Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without
the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution.
This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming,
and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems.

This publication has been peer reviewed.

About the author

Franco Marucci is a former Professor of English at the Universities of Siena, Florence and Venice Ca’ Foscari. His publications include Il senso interrotto. Autonomia e codificazione nella poesia di Dylan Thomas (1976), The Fine Delight that Fathers Thought: Rhetoric and Medievalism in Gerard Manley Hopkins (1994), L’inchiostro del mago. Saggi di letteratura inglese dell’Ottocento (2009) and Joyce (2013). The unabridged English translation of his Storia della letteratura inglese (8 vols, 2003–2017) has now been published by Peter Lang (8 vols, 2018–2019). As a creative writer he is the author of Pentapoli (2011), followed by Il Michelin del sacro (2012). He runs the blog <http://francomarucci.wordpress.com>, with comments and features on literature, cinema and music, and a weekly sports page.

About the book

‘Franco Marucci seems to have read everything written in the century between Byron and James Joyce. The breadth and depth of this reading provides steady illumination of topics familiar and unfamiliar, and brings many new things to light. Professional erudition and persistence turn up many trouvailles and not a few truffles. A notable addition to scholarship.’

– Michael Alexander, Emeritus Professor of English, University of St Andrews

‘A remarkable collection of essays, displaying a far from common theoretical acuteness acting on dauntless erudition. Marucci’s explorations of the “dialogic element” in major and minor texts of Victorian and early Modern authors are always interesting and often surprising. When does Marucci, the most “Victorian” of Italian critics, find time to read and write so much?’

– Francesco Rognoni, Professor of English and American Literature,
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore – Milan and Brescia

‘Franco Marucci traces a fascinating trajectory that invites us to rethink the works of iconic English authors at the intersection of two centuries. The compelling questions in this collection insightfully reinterpret a literary and cultural transition which, with its multifaceted tensions between tradition and innovation, continues to speak to us.’

– Nicoletta Pireddu, Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature,
Georgetown University

This book gathers together essays and papers written over a time span of around fifteen years. Partly retitled and revised, they were selected for the book because they all focus on the dialogic element in a series of literary works produced in the period extending from late Romanticism to early Modernism. By ‘dialogic’, the author means the sharing of common preoccupations, the recursiveness of motifs, themes and patterns, the emergence of constants, a network of explicit or hidden confrontations. Dialogues may then arise between an author and other contemporaries in the form of an explicit theoretical discussion in letters or critical essays; or implicitly, and allusively, in inventive negotiations that respond to previous works through parody or adaptation. After a concise introduction stating the author’s theoretical debt to the insightful theories of the Russian semiotician and typologist Yuri Lotman, single essays discuss Byron, Ruskin, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, Hopkins, Ouida, Joyce and T. S. Eliot.

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Preface

chapter 1
Morphology of the Donjuanesque Remake

chapter 2
Written Landscape: Homer, Dante, Ruskin

chapter 3
Rapt Passivity: George Eliot’s ‘The Lifted Veil’

chapter 4
Romola on Home Ground

chapter 5
Patterns of Intermittence in Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’

chapter 6
Arnold’s Biblical Reductionism

chapter 7
An Ouida Triptych

The Fascination of Moral Laxity

Myth in Moths

‘Animals Are the Only True Humans’

chapter 8
A Victorian Oxymoron: The ‘Mastering’ and ‘Merciful God’

chapter 9
Did Hopkins Believe in Metempsychosis?

chapter 10
T. S. Eliot, the Melodramatic and Wilkie Collins’s Armadale

chapter 11
Joyce’s Italian ‘Frenemy’

chapter 12
A Neglected Dialogue: Joyce and Giuseppe Giacosa’s Libretti and Plays

Sources

Index