Nancy Isenberg
Giustiniana Wynne and the invention of Eastern Europe
Abstract
The Anglo-Venetian writer Giustiniana Wynne has been the subject of three papers delivered at WWIH meetings. Two of these papers examined her anthropological novel Les Morlaques (1788). They identified Wynne’s novel: as an early (possibly the earliest) novel written by a woman in Italy (Irene Zanini-Cordi, Bochum 2009); as an early example of feminist sensitivity in literary writing in French (Véronique Church-Duplessis, Bochum, 2009).
This paper looks at Les Morlaques – a story of love, family bonds, and vengeful violence in a ‘primitive’ society - from the perspective of the (Western) European Enlightenment’s invention of the ‘Eastern European’ Other. It thus places the author in the larger pan-European cultural context of writers that heralded the Romantic Movement’s demi-orientalism with their Rousseauian works about neighbouring peoples to the East.
More specifically, it places Wynne at the centre of the Romantic phenomenon of ‘Morlacchimania’, alongside Fortis, Goethe, Herder, Madame de Staël, Nodier, Mérimée. These writers collectively created an outsiders’ folkloric portrait of Slave society, mores and customs – a sentimental portrait that lived on well into the 20th century, conditioning the ‘Western’ popular imagination.
Les Morlaques, well received in its time, circulated not only in French but also in Italian and two different German translations. Its influence on other writers’ works (in Western Europe) and the critical attention it has attracted among scholars (in Eastern and Western Europe) will also be examined in this paper.
SvD, March 2012
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