Abstract

The article proposes a reading of the composite travel book Italy (1821) by Lady Morgan (née Sydney Owenson), from a theoretical perspective intersecting the methods of environmental studies, ecocriticism, and geocriticism. After presenting the travelogue as a text characterised by a place-oriented aesthetics showing how Italian geography is everywhere enmeshed with its multi-layered cultural and political context, the article highlights the ways in which Italy challenges anthropocentrism by depicting the material world as an agent in its own right. Throughout Italy, the author’s interiority relates to exteriority in ways that suggest her full awareness of a world that is independent of her imagination. At the same time, however, by representing an Italian natural environment as a geo-cultural ecosystem inscribed with signs of human history, Morgan acknowledges the multiple impact that culture can have on nature. Sometimes, compromises are reached between the laws of nature and the interests of humankind; on other occasions, the exploitative actions of humankind on the environment produce so-called “wasteocenicµ scenarios, which call for what ecological thinkers would nowadays define as environmental justice. In this case, Morgan’s assemblage of the human and nonhuman becomes a vehicle for her socio-political critique, which distinguishes Italy from other Romanticperiod women’s travel books on the Bel Paese.