Transatlantic Conversations: Nineteenth-Century American Women's Encounters with Italy and the Atlantic World ed. by Beth L. Lueck, Sirpa Salenius, and Nancy Lusignan Schultz (review)

Beth L. Lueck has collaborated with coeditors Sirpa Salenius and Nancy Lusignan Schultz on her second book for the University of New Hampshire Press series Becoming Modern: New Nineteenth-Century Studies. These seventeen essays provide fresh perspectives on the work of well-known writers and reintroduce readers to formerly popular (but now marginalized) American women. Divided into three sections, the collection delivers on its promise to "explore a range of issues, such as women's geographical and metaphorical travel, social and political mobility, writing and activism, and women as instigators of change" (xvi).

Part 1, "Reports on the Risorgimento," spotlights American women's connections to Italy during its reconception of itself from a nation of individual states to a unified republic. Although one might anticipate Sarah Margaret Fuller's centrality to this discussion, the editors' decision to lead with an essay on Catharine Maria Sedgwick is a clever subversion of expectations, signaling to readers that many American women participated in transatlantic exchanges. Lucinda L. Damon-Bach traces how Sedgwick's allusions to individual Italians' stories in her Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (1841) create a sympathetic bond between American readers and the Italian people, resulting in a transcendence of national boundaries and expanding upon the meaning of "kindred" for Sedgwick and, by extension, her audience. The remainder of part 1 focuses on Fuller. As the Italian people endeavored to overcome differences and realize a republic, Sonia Di Loreto argues, Fuller championed the press's role in nation building while simultaneously using her own articles to convince American readers that these patriots were experiencing something akin to their own revolution. Gigliola Sacerdoti Mariani delves further into Fuller's participation in Italian patriotism by exploring her admiration of Giuseppe Mazzini. Using a concordance, Mariani isolates "fit words" (an allusion to a phrase used by Fuller) indicating Fuller's support for "the cause of Italian freedom" and her attempt to secure American aid (39). Mariani's identification and analyses of Fuller's predilections in diction facilitates a nice segue into Mariarosa Mettifogo's psychological essay on Fuller's attainment of intercultural competence. Mettifogo uses Milton Bennett's Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity in tandem with Fuller's Summer on the Lakes (1844) and New-York Tribune dispatches to show Fuller's successful progression through Bennett's stages.

Fuller provides a bridge from part 1 to part 2. Titled "Transatlantic Exchanges with Italian Culture," this section shifts from political themes to Italian art, puppetry, and religion. Joan R. Wry and Jeffrey Steele analyze Fuller's ekphrastic poetry and "mythic imagination," respectively, to model personal and social processes of transformation and creative rebirth (90). Debra J. Rosenthal's essay signals the book's transition from Fuller to other writers, exposing the pernicious cycle that emerged in the racial caricatures popularized by puppet-show adaptations of Uncle Tom's Cabin. European puppet shows co-opted these portrayals, which were performed at home and imported back to America. In the second of three essays in this collection on Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rita Bode explores the coincidences between Stowe's and George Eliot's novels on Savonarola, a Dominican friar. Her intricate comparison of the two writers, their two excursions, and their two novels, including their treatments of Savonarola, make for a fascinating read. Denise Knight's psychoanalytic reading of the tense relationships among Charlotte Perkins Gilman, her ex-husband, and their daughter Katherine wraps up the second section.

Part 3, "Encounters with the Atlantic World," moves beyond Italy and is nearly the same size as the first two sections combined. The editors note that this part "illuminate[s] the rich transatlantic exchanges with other parts of the Atlantic seaboard" (xxii). The first two essays...