Conclusion

The Conclusion focuses on the delicate balance between investment in Italy and disenchantment with the Risorgimento’s outcome in the period following official Italian unification in 1861. Late nineteenth-century writers like Henry James and Vernon Lee step back from Risorgimento politics to depoliticise Italy, returning it to the aesthetic domain; yet, an unsettling quality of resurgence, or risorgimento, lingers in the skeletal Juliana Bordereau of James’s ‘The Aspern Papers’ (1888) and the revived corpse Medea da Carpi of Lee’s ‘Amour Dure’ (1887/1890). George Meredith’s post-unification Vittoria (1866), in particular, points to the conflicts that the creation of an Italian nation-state failed to resolve; these contests, the Risorgimento’s cultural remains, reveal the centrality of loss, dissent and struggle to the Risorgimento’s legacy. However, Italian politics also played an invigorating, energising role for nineteenth-century British literature and culture, enlivening political discourse, cultural production and literary experimentation through its oppositionalist character.