Dr Gioia Angeletti - orcid.org/0000-0003-3914-432X
Nominated Fellow, May - June 2022
Home institution: University of Parma, Italy
Gioia Angeletti took her PhD in Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow in 1997, and since 2015 she has been Associate Professor of English literature at the University of Parma. She has published a wide range of essays and articles in international journals on English and Scottish poets and playwrights of the Romantic and Victorian periods. More recently, she has also contributed articles on contemporary Scottish theatre (David Greig and women dramatists, mainly). Her major authored and edited volumes include: as author, Eccentric Scotland: Three Victorian Poets. James Thomson (“B. V.”), John Davidson and James Young Geddes (2004), Lord Byron and Discourses of Otherness: Scotland, Italy, and Femininity (2012), and Nation, Community, Self: Female Voices in Scottish Theatre from the Late Sixties to the Present (2018); as editor, “Esotismo/Orientalismo”, a double issue of La Questione Romantica (2004), Emancipation, Liberation, and Freedom: Romantic Drama and Theatre in Britain, 1760-1830 (2010), and, with Valentina Poggi, a volume on the Scottish playwright Joan Ure (2010). Her main current projects include a book-length study titled Scottish Borderers at the Edge and Core of Empire: Mungo Park, John Leyden, Thomas Pringle, and Scottish Migration Literature 1790-1830.
Project Title: Empire and Gender in Scottish Migration Literature: Lady Anne Barnard’s “Cape” Writings
The present research proposal fits in coherently with and will make a new contribution to one of my main research fields, that is, “Scottish migration literature and transculturality” – an investigation of the works of Scottish writers who differently engaged with British imperial administration, and, for several years, sojourned in or travelled through the countries colonized or to be soon colonized by the UK, thus experiencing various forms of otherness and trans- or intercultural relationships. The Romantic-period Scottish poet Thomas Pringle is still regarded by the majority of scholars as the first South African writer in English. However, recent studies have shown that, many years before the publication of his major works in 1834, another Scot had written extensively about the life, culture and colonial situation in the Cape Colony between the end of the eighteenth- and the beginning of the nineteenth-century. Lady Anne Lindsay, wife to the colonial secretary Andrew Barnard, resided with him in South Africa from 1797 to 1802, and from there she wrote poetry, diaries and letters (to Henry Dundas, then British Secretary of State for War), which deserve more critical attention than they have so far received. Mary Louise Pratt briefly mentions her in her study Imperial Eyes (1992) but she has been generally neglected by critics, despite the availability of her Cape journals thanks to the edition produced by A.M. Lewin Robinson in 1994. Generally remembered as the author of the ballad “Auld Robin Gray”, included in an 1825 collection edited by Walter Scott for the Bannatyne Club, Lady Barnard should in fact be reassessed as a travel writer whose narratives of exile provide invaluable evidence of the kind of negotiations and compromises that women in colonial contexts had to make in order to preserve their reputation as “bearers of culture” and “mediators” between Self and Other. The fact that Lady Barnard prohibited the publication of both her poems and journals about South Africa is definitely a sign of her deference to the contemporary gender-normative codes, which required feminine reticence, especially on subjects concerning the political, public sphere. The research project involves a careful reading of Lady Barnard’s “Cape Writings” (all the poems, letters and journals written there) with the central aim to show their yet unrecognized relevance as colonial documents concerning not only Scotland’s role within the British Empire but also the particular position of women in that context. The above-mentioned reticence evident in her writings often turns out to be latently subversive, since they are marked by a dialectics of the said and unsaid, an ironic tone and a poetics of silence that reveal her ambiguous position as to colonial relations, racial otherness, and slavery, thus ultimately challenging official colonial discourses.
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