Cosmopolitan Collage in Casa Guidi Windows

초록

Elizabeth Barrett Browning published Casa Guidi Windows in 1851 following the unsuccessful First Italian War of Independence (1848-49). Having recently moved to Florence in 1847 after her elopement with her husband and fellow poet Robert Browning, Barrett Browning became a passionate supporter of the Italian Risorgimento and Italian national independence. Pace recent criticism addressing the poem’s influence on Italian nation making, this article views Casa Guidi Windows as a form of world-making that seeks to educate an English middle class about its international responsibilities and to create new cosmopolitan subjectivities by teaching them to look at Italy in a new way. This article analyzes the poem’s highly fragmented structure as a form of cosmopolitan collage that anticipates key elements of early twentieth-century Cubism. The poem’s representation of overlapping geographical and historical perspectives functions as a form of cosmopolitan collage that resists linear national narratives and introduces a new type of cosmopolitan subjectivity focused on spatial contiguity and synchronic temporality.

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