Geography of a Stereotype: A Computational Study on the Italian Presence in the British Nineteenth Century Novel

Abstract

Often chosen as the privileged setting for plays, poems, and novels, Italy has certainly been at the core of the English literary imagery from the Middle Ages to Modernism. However, more than an actual geographical space, the presence of Italian locations within the corpus of British literature configures itself as a distinctive discursive practice disclosing a variety of literary possibilities; an inexhaustible basin of themes and conventions capable of putting the English writer in what Roland Barthes called a situation d'écriture, a writing situation (Barthes 1970). But what are the features at the basis of the construction of Italy as a writing situation? What is the relationship between the use of certain Italian locations and the development of specific sub-genres? Using innovative tools of the computer-based macro analysis such as topic modelling and words-cohort correlation, in what follows I will give evidence of the occurrences and the transformations of the Italian stereotype throughout the British novel from 1780 to 1890. The aim of the project is to investigate the changes in the relative representation of different geographical areas in the fictional space of the novel thus testing, with new empirical tools and evidences, the assumption that "a new space . . . gives rise to a new form” (Moretti 1998: 197)