Download or read book The Fatal Gift of Beauty written by Manfred Pfister and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 1996 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first anthology of British travel writing on Italy which traces the development of the genre and the history of the British perception of Italy from the Renaissance to the present. As an anthologie raissonn�eit presents the texts in thematic clusters and chronological order, providing commentary and annotations for each of them and their nearly hundred authors (some of them, like Smollett, Byron, Dickens or Huxley, well-known, others virtually unknown, amongst them many unduly neglected women writers). Further features are a substantial introduction to the travelogue and the writing of Italy, more than thirty illustrations visualizing the British experience of Italy, and an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources.