https://oxford.academia.edu/LeonieWanitzek
Supervisor: Dr Stefano Evangelista
Research Interests: Late Victorian and early 20th-century literature, national and cultural identity, "Englishness", Anglo-Italian encounters, space and place, travel and tourism, leisure.
Doctoral Research: My research focuses on British writers and Italy in the period 1880-1920. I explore how literary representations of Italy, particularly Italian places, simultaneously produce constructions of English cultural and national identity. My thesis combines three central case studies (Vernon Lee, E. M. Forster and D. H. Lawrence) with a consideration of works by other contemporary authors and of contemporary discourses on tourism, nationalism, art and history. It additionally seeks to develop an analytic framework derived from space theory to trace the underlying textual processes resulting in the constructions of Italian spaces and British identities across a range of literary genres.