PICTURES OF ITALY: AMERICAN AESTHETIC RESPONSE AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN TRAVEL SKETCH

This dissertation is a study of the American uses of the travel sketch during the nineteenth century in confronting Italy, for most Americans the essence of the Old World. By focusing on the travel sketch, the study concentrates on the genre through which writers came to terms with the European scene most directly. Tracing the evolution of this prose form in the works of Irving, Cooper, Hawthorne, James and others reveals the meaning of Italy for American authors and illustrates the growth and ramification of a peculiarly American sense of the relativity of point of view.;In the Romantic period, the focus of this study, the form of the sketch was most appropriately used in observing the Italian landscape; both the sketch and its subject became opportunities for suggesting intuitive meanings rather than building rational connections.;The travel sketch, as opposed to other types of travel literature, emerged out of the application of the late eighteenth-century British aesthetic theory of the picturesque to the experience of the tourist. In its broadest sense, it allowed its practitioners to shape and depict a wide range of aesthetic experience--from the soothingly beautiful to the terrifyingly sublime. By 1800 landscape sketching, both in painting and in prose, was firmly linked to travel and especially to travel in Italy.