Introduction: Britain, Ireland and the Italian Risorgimento

Abstract

Britain, Ireland and the Italian Risorgimento brings together scholars working in and across a range of academic disciplines in order to examine British and Irish responses to the Italian national question in the mid-nineteenth century, and the impact of the Risorgimento on mid-century British and Irish politics, society and culture. The book also considers British attitudes towards Italy in the decades immediately following Italian unification, and Italian views of Ireland and Britain during and after the Irish War of Independence, 1919–21. The book focusses on two key themes: nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nationalism and the construction of national identity (British, Irish and Italian); and the roles of religion, exile, politics and culture in shaping nationalist movements and national identities (both internally and externally perceived). As such, the book not only builds on the now well-established idea of the nation as an ‘imagined community’, but it also extends the methods and approaches of the ‘new cultural historians’ of the Italian Risorgimento such as Lucy Riall, Alberto Banti and Silvana Patriarca to the transnational context. In this respect, the book goes a step further than Riall and Patriarca’s The Risorgimento Revisited (2011), which explores how ‘the idea, or better the imaginary, of the nation [was] formulated, represented and expressed’ in Italy.¹