Dissertation: "Sex, Aesthetics, and Modernity in the British Romance of Italy, 1870-1914"

Certified Spring 2011

Carl Lehnen's dissertation argues that late Victorian and Edwardian writers—particularly Walter Pater, J. A. Symonds, Vernon Lee, and E.M. Forster—used narratives about travel to Italy in order to articulate non-normative sexualities in terms of the foreign, the anachronistic, and the southern. These texts attempt to make sense of same-sex desires at a time before a notion of sexual identity rooted in sexual object choice could be taken for granted. In the absence of a widely accepted model for the forms of desire and social collectivity they imagined, these writers turned to the foreign in pursuit of new ways of being in the world. In articulating sexuality in terms of Italy, they drew on and revised a range of nineteenth-century discourses about travel, culture, history, and art that were linked to discourses of race and evolutionism. Anchoring my analysis in the categories of space, sexuality, and genre, I illuminate the relations between politics and form and contend that the intra-European distinction between north and south structured Victorian discourses of history, sexuality, and aesthetics.