In blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction, diplomats and travellers, English nation and Italian nation, Maura O'Connor shows us the extent to which imagination, pleasure and politics were intimately interwoven in her story of the English middle-class fascination with the Italian peninsula from the early 1800s through to the 1860s. O'Connor uses a variety of sources, ranging from travel writings and the popular press to diplomatic dispatches and official correspondence, to illustrate how influential the romance of Italy was to the bourgeois, liberal, and above all English social order during a time when class society was undergoing reconfiguration. Her use of the collective imagination as a crucial historical tool, and her emphasis on narrative as a means not only to read texts but also to understand political sources such as diplomatic documents as reflections of culture, ensures that this book breaks new ground and defies conventional categorization. Also included are the unique assertions that the concepts of Englishness and 'England' were conceived in anything but isolation, and that neither high politics nor foreign policy may be viewed as domains separate from the forces of cultural imagination and production.

MAURA O'CONNOR is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati.