TY - BOOK AU - Berthold,Dennis ED - Project Muse. TI - American Risorgimento : : Herman Melville and the Cultural Politics of Italy / SN - 9780814271414 PY - 2009/// CY - Columbus PB - Ohio State University Press KW - Melville, Herman. KW - Melville, Herman, KW - Nationale Einheit KW - gnd KW - Kulturelle Entwicklung KW - Rezeption KW - Risorgimento KW - Civilization KW - Italian influences KW - fast KW - LITERARY CRITICISM KW - General KW - bisacsh KW - United States KW - Italy KW - Italie KW - Histoire KW - 1815-1870 KW - History KW - Criticism, interpretation, etc KW - Electronic books. KW - local N1 - Italy in the American imagination : a divided vision -- Mardi's Dantean intertext -- Fleeing revolution : the rise and fall of the Roman republic -- Machiavellian aesthetics : from Pierre to the Confidence-man -- The triumph of nationality : early poems and Battle-pieces -- "The Italian turn of thought" : Clarel and late writings; Open Access N2 - "Although Herman Melville is typically considered one of America's earliest cosmopolitan writers, scholarship has focused primarily on his involvement with the South Seas, England, and the Holy Land. In American Risorgimento: Herman Melville and the Cultural Politics of Italy, Dennis Berthold extends Melville's transnational vision both geographically and historically by examining his many references to Italy and Rome in the context of the Risorgimento, Italy's long quest for independence and political unity." "Melville's contemporaries, notably Margaret Fuller and Henry T. Tuckerman, recognized the similarities between the Risorgimento and America's struggle for national identity, and the influx of exiles from the failed Italian revolutions of 1820 and 1831 made Melville's New York a hotbed of Risorgimento sympathies. Literary and political expostulations on Italy's plight combined to create a distinctively American view of the Risorgimento that Melville elaborated in his fiction through allusions, characterizations, and direct commentary on Roman history, Dante, Machiavelli, Pope Pius IX, and Giuseppe Mazzini." "Melville followed the unfolding drama of Italian nationalism more closely than any other major American writer and found in it tropes and themes that fueled his turn to poetry, particularly after his visit to Italy in 1857. The Civil War, a crisis for American nationalism as urgent and profound as the Risorgimento, reinforced the symbolic parallels between the United States and Italy and led Melville to meditate on Giuseppe Garibaldi and other Italian patriots in one of his longest poems." "Melville's literary appropriations of Italian history, art, and politics demonstrate that transnational cultural exchanges are not confined to later American writing but originate with the country's earliest authors and their recognition that any national literature worthy of the name must incorporate a broad international frame of reference."--Jacket UR - https://muse.jhu.edu/book/27773/ ER -