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The Italian Edited by Allen W. Grove ISBN 1-932780-00-9 Price $12.95 |
About the Book The Italian (1797) is the culminating work of the career of Ann Radcliffe, England’s most popular and successful writer of the 1790s. The novel charts the machinations blocking the impetuous and aristocratic Vivaldi from marrying the beautiful, lower-class Ellena. The darkest of Radcliffe’s novels, The Italian is often thought to be her best work. The scenes of sublime nature, mysterious groans, corrupt ecclesiastics, isolated fortifications, and Inquisitional torture reveal eighteenth-century Gothic fiction at its finest. The College Publishing edition presents an accurate first-edition text that leaves Radcliffe’s idiosyncratic syntax, grammar, and spelling untouched. This edition includes a substantial introductory essay on the literary, historical, and biographical contexts of the novel, as well as a series of short essays on central topics such as the sublime, sensibility, monastic orders, and the Inquisition. Also reproduced in this edition are paintings by artists who influenced Radcliffe, including Salvator Rosa, Claude Lorrain, and Guido Reni. The appendix includes a map of locations in The Italian, and short Gothic stories and essays by several of Radcliffe’s contemporaries: Mary Hays, John and Anna Aikin, Harriet Lee, and Nathan Drake. |
About the Editor Allen Grove (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania) is Associate Professor of English at Alfred University in Alfred, New York. He has authored several articles and reviews on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. His research and teaching often explore the interplay between sexuality, science, and genre in Gothic fiction, and his classes are frequently cross-listed with Women’s Studies and Critical Discourse Studies. He is currently editing editions of Matthew Lewis’s The Monk and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, as well as an anthology entitled Mostly Ghostly: Haunting Tales From Around the World. |
Table of Contents Acknowledgments List of Illustrations Note on the Text Introduction Select Bibliography The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents Photo of first edition title page Volume I Volume II Volume III Appendix Map of Places in The Italian “Review of Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian” from The Critical Review “On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror with Sir Bertrand, A Fragment” by John and Anna Lætitia Aikin “On Objects of Terror and Montmorenci, A Fragment” by Nathan Drake “The Abbey of Clunedale, A Tale” by Nathan Drake “A Fragment in the Manner of the Old Romances” by Mary Hays “The Old Woman’s Tale. Lothaire: A Legend” by Harriet Lee For Further Exploration Physiognomy Sensibility Aesthetics I: The Sublime, with Salvator Rosa’s Landscape Aesthetics II: The Beautiful, with Claude Lorrain’s Village Festival Mount Vesuvius, with Jean Baptiste Genillion’s Eruption of Vesuvius Women’s Conduct Marriage Religious Orders The Holy Inquisition, with an engraving from Philippus van Limborch’s The History of the Inquisition Italian Money |
