Georgia Alù. Beyond the Traveller’s Gaze: Expatriate Ladies Writing in Sicily (1848-1910). Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008. ISBN: 9783039110537. Price: US$82.95/£40.00 Annemarie McAllister. John Bull’s Italian Snakes and Ladders: English Attitudes to Italy in the mid-nineteenth Century. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. ISBN: 9781847182623. Price: US$52.99/£34.99

In the study of art and culture, it is easy to feel torn between two levels of analysis: on the one hand, the general view capable of synthesizing broad swaths of data into a memorable picture; on the other, the loving attention to detail characteristic of close readings. These two books present the advantages and drawbacks to each approach. While both concern themselves with Britain’s relation to Italy in the nineteenth century, McAllister aims at an ambitious survey of how Englishness was constructed in relation to representations of Italy in the mid-Victorian period, whereas Alù’s book is more modest, offering case studies of three women from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century who lived in Sicily and wrote about it in letters, memoirs, and histories. McAllister’s book is wide-ranging in terms of both its archive and its analysis. It covers the high and the low, the canonical and the little known, discussing not only The Woman in White (1859-60), but also Wilkie Collins’s more obscure first novel, Antonina (1850), about the Goths’ invasion of Rome. Of particular interest is her generous attention to illustrations in Punch and the Illustrated London News, which makes the book a valuable supplement to other studies primarily concerned with examples from literature or high art. Its organization is topical, highlighting Italy’s high profile in almost every important aspect of Victorian culture—literature, art, music, history, and politics—and the multiplicity of responses that it elicited. As McAllister writes, McAllister is to be commended for tackling so much in a short study, and for keeping in constant view the sheer variety of these often contradictory views of Italy. Anyone interested in a survey of Italy’s symbolic importance to England would do well to consult this book. At the same time, the book’s organization can occasionally feel a bit loose. For instance, chapter seven begins with a discussion of representations of Italians as dirty or unhygienic, then moves on to a fascinating investigation of illustrations that depict Italian organ grinders as simian or degenerate, before culminating in an analysis of the trope of the Italian villain, particularly as it relates to Count Fosco in Collins’s The Woman in White. All three subjects deserve attention, but beyond their dealing with negative representations, there’s not much to connect these case studies beyond an appeal to certain broad themes, such as othering, projection, and ambivalence. McAllister attributes the diversity of these representations of Italy to the ambivalence and uncertainty that the English middle-class male felt about his own place in the world. Drawing from the work of John Tosh and Herbert Sussman on Victorian masculinities, McAllister argues that the anxieties surrounding bourgeois masculinity created the “need to maintain or improve one’s standing and to separate oneself from females, foreigners, and ‘lower’ social classes who might be jockeying for one’s rights or position” (29). With clear debts to Edward Said and, to a lesser extent, Homi Bhabha, she argues that the nineteenth-century bourgeois male attempted to bolster his own identities by imagining Italy either as an abjected “other” or, in the wake of the Risorgimento, as a fledgling nation eager to follow Britain’s example. The wealth of evidence that McAllister provides makes clear that some such relationship existed, but this thesis is not substantially developed beyond the rather familiar themes of othering, projection, and mimicry. This may be due at least in part to the limitations of the book’s central metaphor, John Bull playing a game of snakes and ladders with representations of Italy. Under this model, McAllister posits a characteristic English subject, John Bull, who is continually anxious and …