Scholarship examining the figure of the English writer in Italy as well as the impact of Italy on the English imagination has always featured prominently within the Journal of Anglo-Italian Studies. This is therefore an appropriate context in which to ask why it may seem that in recent years there have been comparatively few English writers whose work is significantly shaped by what Alice Leccese Powers referred to some time ago as the phenomenality of 'Italy in Mind.' Of course, that impression risks appearing ill-informed. To suggest that there may currently be a crisis in the tradition upholding the immediacy of Italy and of Italian culture within the English literary imagination is to overlook the work of Tim Parks (who provides the focus for this paper), or Marina Warner, or Simon Mawer, or Lisa St Aubin de Teran, or Tobias Jones. Italian life and culture features prominently in the texts of all these writers. However, despite the reassurance which the work of these authors provides, as well as that emerging from others who could doubtless be invoked here, I am not entirely persuaded that the idea that Italy may somehow have become less pervasively present to the English literary imagination, superficial as that impression may be, is entirely to be dismissed. More extended research might assess more closely the degree to which that idea, so open to the charge of misrepresentation and even fatuousness, is at all tenable. It would need to indicate some of the methodological difficulties in identifying any kind of decline at all within cultural relations and cultural memory. It will acknowledge that to admit that any attempt to 'read' supposed shifts in the literary imagination, or the process whereby any such shifts register in the mind of that amorphous being, the common reader, must be very brave. [excerpt]

peer-reviewed