Leonie Wareham Wanitzek

https://oxford.academia.edu/LeonieWanitzek

Supervisor: Dr Stefano Evangelista

Thesis Title: Encounters with Italy: British Writers Constructing Space, Place and Identity, 1880-1930

Research Interests: British writing on Italy, space and place, travel writing and tourism, Late Victorian and early 20th-century literature, Vernon Lee, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, national and cultural identity, "Englishness", leisure. 

Doctoral Research: My research focuses on British writers and literary representations of Italy in the period 1880-1930. I am interested in textual constructions of Italian places and spaces and, simultaneously, English cultural and national identities, across a range of fictional and non-fictional genres. My thesis focuses on three central case studies (Vernon Lee, E. M. Forster and D. H. Lawrence), within the context of works by their contemporaries and 19th- and early-20th-century discourses on tourism, nationalism, art and history. It additionally seeks to develop an analytic framework derived from space theory (particularly Henri Lefebvre and Bertrand Westphal) to understand the underlying textual and socio-cultural processes of ‘writing Italy’.