Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations: The Italian Influence

Anglo-Italian cultural relations have always been fairly close. Even if one leaves aside Anglo-Saxon times and the missionaries sent by Pope Gregory the Great to bring Christianity to England, the medieval and later periods witnessed the coming and going of people, goods, works of art, books, and ideas between Britain and Italy: on the English side, from Geoffrey Chaucer traveling to Italy and being influenced by Dante’s and Petrarch’s works to the Inglese Italianato of the Renaissance and the British Grand Tourists of later times, up to the present-day lovers of “Chiantishire”; on the Italian side, bankers, musicians, and artists gravitating towards London, then the anglomania of the eighteenth century, the rage for Byron and the cult of Britain’s political institutions in the following century, as well as the admiration for all things British ever since. In general terms, the crosscurrents of influence and exchange between Italy and Britain, though usually quite strong, were not synchronous: the taking and giving were prevalent in the two countries at different times. Given this context, Anglo-Italian cultural relations have long been the object of academic research, the traditional critical interest for literature, art, and music being widened, especially in recent decades, to include linguistic, historical, and sociocultural issues. Research focuses on such topics as the reception of authors and the editions, translations, or critical assessments of their works, the various stages of Anglo-Italian relations against the backdrop of the nations’ sociocultural and political history, as well as in-depth analyses of the contacts and reciprocal influence between the two languages. Of course, while some studies have a decidedly literary, linguistic, or sociocultural and historical character, others display an overlapping of different research perspectives, which is particularly interesting and revealing in the case of Anglo-Italian relations. The present bibliography only deals with the Italian influence on the British cultural world, since including a bibliographical survey of the impact in the opposite direction would require at least an equally long list of material, and a different organization of it. With a few exceptions, the terminus a quo for the selected items is the 1990s, when Alfonso Sammut’s Bibliography of Anglo-Italian Comparative Literary Criticism, 1800–1990 was published. Little or no reference will be made to works discussing the Italian influence in the field of music and the visual arts (to be dealt with in other Oxford Bibliographies). No mention will be made of research dealing with the British interest in all things Italian in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, not so much because the range of relevant areas would probably increase beyond control, but because the most relevant ones—for example, the food-and-drink, fashion, and luxury industries—would be largely unrelated to the traditional, age-old lure of Italy.