Davison C., Laurent B., Patey C., Vanfasse N. (eds.) Provence and the British Imagination

Milan: Ledizioni, 2014. — 236 p. — (Di/Segni, No. 5). — ISBN 978-88-6705-137-3, 978-88-6705-360-5.Although it resonates today with lavender fields, sunny heritage locations and the gentrified memory of Paul Cézanne’s pictorial turbulence, Provence has not always been the attractive territory of pacified leisure and festival culture. Since the seventeenth century, indeed, the region has inscribed its shifting geography, complex politics and the extraordinary diversity of its land and seascapes in the perception and imagination of British visitors. In the steps of anonymous or excellent travellers, the chapters of this volume chart some of the most significant moments in the intercultural transactions between the proud linguistic and literary distinctiveness of the province on one hand and the always challenged and sometimes baffled perception of Anglophone (and Anglophile) visitors on the other. Spanning across two centuries, from the largely unknown pre-revolutionary Provence visited by John locke and Tobias Smollett through the Victorian paradise of popular tourism and finally to the more secret ‘homeland’ of Modernists, this volume reveals an unexpected Provence which, in oblique and complex ways, has long held a mirror to British culture and often acted as the laboratory of its artistic life.List of Illustrations
Caroline Patey. Introduction
Early Encounters
Nathalie Bernard. Provence and the British Imagination in Tobias Smollett’s Travels through France and Italy (1766)
Fauke Josenhans. Contrasting Looks on Southern France: British Painters and the Visual Exploration of Provence in the 18th and Early 19th Centuries
Karyn Wilson-Costa. Of Bards and Troubadours: From rime couée to the ‘Burns Stanza’
Laurent Bury. “My very dreams are of Provence”: Le bon Roi René, from Walter Scott to the Pre-Raphaelites
Victorian Variations
Nathalie Vanfasse. “Silent, burnt up, shadeless and glaring”: Provence Seen through Victorian Editions of Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in France
Anne-Florence Gillard-Estrada. Walter Pater’s Representation of “the central love-poetry of Provence”
Béatrice Laurent. The Irish Troubadour of the Provençal Félibrige: William Charles Bonaparte-Wyse
Simone Francescato. Eccentric Naturalists: Henry James and the Provençal Novelist Alphonse Daudet
Jean-Pierre Naugrette. “Such ecstasies of recognition”: R.L. Stevenson’s “Ordered South” (1874) as Riviera Requiem
Landscapes of Modernity
Gilles Teulié. Monarchy, Spirituality and Britishness: The Anglican Diaspora in Grasse, 1880-1950
Francesca Cuojati. Into Gypsydom: Augustus John’s Provence
Massimo Bacigalupo. Ezra the Troubadour
Christine Reynier. Mapping Ford Madox Ford’s Provence in Provence
Coda
Antony Penrose. Roland Penrose and the Impulse of ProvenceIndex of Names
Index of Most Important Places
Notes on ContributorsTrue PDF