Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

An outward turn

Comings and goings in Rapallo
by
August 2021, no. 434

The Poets of Rapallo: How Mussolini’s Italy shaped British, Irish, and US writers by Lauren Arrington

Oxford University Press, US$35 hb, 248 pp

An outward turn

Comings and goings in Rapallo
by
August 2021, no. 434

How best to tell the history of literature? – a long, chronological survey tracing broad arcs of development, or as a tight focus on a single, transformative year? The dedicated study of a single writer’s life, or the story of a movement, of several writers brought together for a time by some common cause? In recent years, the history of modernist literature has enjoyed these and other treatments. In Poets and the Peacock Dinner: The literary history of a meal (2014), Lucy McDiarmid takes as her subject a single evening: a dinner, held in West Sussex on 18 January 1914, in honour of the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and attended by six other poets, including W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound. That famous evening serves to focus a wide-ranging discussion of literary friendship and romance, collaboration and rivalry.

In her new book, The Poets of Rapallo, Lauren Arrington instead chooses a place: the picturesque Italian seaside town of Rapallo, ‘nestled in a placid bay on the Ligurian coast’, where in the late 1920s and early 1930s several British, Irish, and American writers and artists lived and holidayed.

Sean Pryor reviews 'The Poets of Rapallo: How Mussolini’s Italy shaped British, Irish, and US writers' by Lauren Arrington

The Poets of Rapallo: How Mussolini’s Italy shaped British, Irish, and US writers

by Lauren Arrington

Oxford University Press, US$35 hb, 248 pp

You May Also Like

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.