The conceptual scaffolding of the book also could have been enriched by treating in greater depth the new interpretations of modernizing tendencies that reached the Hispanic world toward the end of the seventeenth century and by including a discussion and application to the Mexican case of such concepts as Italianization (as seen from the perspective of traditional Hispanic historiography as an unacceptable foreign invasion) or
Italianism, a more subtle process that did not necessarily require the physical presence of Italian musicians and involved various strategies of aesthetic modernization driven by new preferences of private patrons, institutions, and listeners (see Andrea Bombi, Entre tradicion y modernidad: El italianismo musical en Valencia (1685-1738), 2 vols.
(7) Many courtiers, however, quickly embraced the growing
Italianism and affected a language heavily characterized by both Italian words and French words recomposed so as to incorporate fragments of Italian.
Placing Montaigne's
Italianism in the context of the virulent anti-Italian polemics in France in the 1570s and 1580s, the paper argues that the strategic choice of Tasso as an emblem for Italy points to a conflicted, deeply ambivalent perspective on Franco-Italian relations in the early modern period.
Another self-commiserating
Italianism repeated several times for comic purposes is "Noi italialiani siamo cosi buoni [We Italians are so good-natured]" (e.g.
Przestrzenie komparatystyki--italianizm (Spaces of Comparative Studies:
Italianism) by Olga Ptaszczewska, is made up of two parts divided into chapters and sub-chapters.
So much did they identify with the "
Italianism" they perceived in Verdi's music that they even seized on his name as a convenient acronym for unification under an Italian king: "Viva VERDI [Victor Emanueel, Re d'Italia]!" Purely instrumental works of the type known as "program" music, which describes something beyond the music itself, also played a part in celebrating feelings of patriotism and regional pride.
He approaches Casa Guidi Windows within the context of a long tradition of British literary representations, analyzing "the English cultural formation 'Italy'" as "
Italianism," a "variant of orientalism or colonial discourse" with some significant differences, however, from colonialisms of varying kinds (p.
And even when they stayed away for a few years around 1840, American composers like Maurice Strakosch and William Henry Fry injected a fair amount of "
Italianism" into their works.
Though much of the book focuses on the paradoxes of nineteenth-century English
Italianism, however, Reynolds's central theme is the role of Victorian poets in creating 'an ideal of national unity, in which individuals would be utterly fulfilled', and whose intrinsic unattainableness only served to heighten its imaginative power (p.