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More than
any other country, Italy enjoys a reputation as the home of
art, beauty, culture and civilisation. From the eighteenth
century, travellers from northern Europe made pilgrimages
to the peninsula to admire its artistic and architectural
heritage, enjoy the majesty of its landscapes and benefit
from its climate. As the seat of both ancient civilisation
and the glories of the Renaissance, an Italian experience
became a necessary part of the education of a well-rounded
person.
The idea
of Italy's special relationship with the aesthetic, as the
bel paese par excellence, was informed by a poetic tradition
stretching back to Dante and Petrarch, and by knowledge of
the paintings of Cimabue, Giotto and the Renaissance masters.
This alluring image of Italy contributed to nationalist sentiments
in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and later
fuelled interest in the country's cinema and fashion industries,
as well as products including Vespa scooters and Ferrari cars.
The MA
Representations of Italy offers an advanced study of Italian
culture through an exploration of how Italy and Italian identity
have been represented since the Renaissance. It examines the
formation and development of the 'cultural' identification
of the country, drawing attention to specific moments and
episodes. It also considers the way this image cohabited and
sometimes clashed with the complex reality of a country that
was marked in the modern period by regional differences, a
weak national state, political instability, little international
influence and late and uneven economic development.
Students
will also be encouraged to choose a number of options from
the other four Modern Languages MAs that will be validated
under the umbrella MA Programme 'Crossing Borders: MA Programme
in European Culture and Theory:
- MA
in European Culture and Theory
- MA
French Literary and Cultural Studies
- MA
Germany: Culture and Crisis
- MA
in 'Hispanic Studies
- The
MA in Representations of Italy, together with the other
MAs in the 'Crossing Borders' programme will be available
for the first time in the Academic Year 2001/2002
For more
information write to our Director of Graduate Study, Dr Guido
Bonsaver, Department of Italian, Royal Holloway, University
of London, Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX phone: 01784 443739; fax:
01784 439196; email: g.bonsaver@rhul.ac.uk
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