Le Grand tour de Shelley et la poésie de la Méditerranée

The travel literature of an island nation evolved into a peculiar new genre, the literature of the Grand Tour, that had appeared in Britain in the 17th century, developing into a true institution by the beginning of the 19th, when Romanticism was in full bloom. Starting from an investigation of this literary phenomenon, the study develops into an exploration of the early 19th century, with a focus on Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose poetry, while encompassing the literary tradition that had already developed, also discovers glowing new ways of refining it into climactic visual/ visionary arresting moments