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Roman Fever
Domesticity and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing
Annamaria Formichella Elsden

“Using a lovely and unobstrusive blend of cultural studies, feminist, and post-structuralist theories, Annamaria Formichella Elsden argues that Italy–its literal geography as well as its mythography–has given a number of American women writers a stage on which to perform their own identities. Elsden is a marvelous writer and this critical study reads like a good nineteenth-century novel. Any scholar interested in women's writing, travel narratives, and nineteenth-century culture should read this enlightening book.”—Cheryl B. Torsney, West Virginia University

Critical studies have frequently acknowledged the nineteenth-century American fascination with Italy, but none specifically examines the impact of Italy on American women's writing. A number of nineteenth-century women were privileged and daring enough to travel abroad, using a range of genres to respond discursively to their new surroundings. Annamaria Formichella Elsden’s study groups six women, whose writings were shaped by their encounters with Italy, to investigate women's attempts to leave behind the domestic, in all the senses of that term.

Roman Fever foregrounds how women writers counteracted dominant stereotypes. Popular nineteenth-century portrayals of women abroad often fell into two categories: the overly assertive "feminist" and the hyper-feminine lady. Texts about Italy by American women move beyond these stereotypes. For women travelers, no longer defined solely in relation to the home, Italy offered opportunities unavailable in a domestic context. Their texts often blurred the boundary between private and public, personal and political, resulting in heightened self-awareness and an interrogation of American republicanism. The author acknowledges that women wrote beyond the narrow boundaries ascribed to them by too much criticism. Many women writers challenged the status quo and expanded the literary terrain available to them. These authors have much to say about what it meant to be a woman, a writer, and an American in the nineteenth century. Elsden argues that the work of these women, which included Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Sophia Peabody Hawthorne's travel writings, Margaret Fuller's news dispatches, Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Agnes of Sorrento, and Constance Fenimore Woolson and Edith Wharton's short stories, challenged American individualist ideology while contributing to patriotic rhetorical tradition.

Annamaria Formichella Elsden is assistant professor of English at Buena Vista University.

May 19th- and 20th-century literary studies, women’s studies, women’s history
200 pp. 6x9
$21.95s paper 0-8142-5117-X
$49.95s cloth 0-8142-0946-7
$9.95s CD 0-8142-9030-2