In blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction, diplomats and travelers, English nation and Italian nation, Maura O'Connor shows us the extent to which imagination, pleasure, and politics were intimately interwoven in her story of the English middle-class fascination with the Italian peninsula from the early 1800s through the 1860s. O’Connor uses a variety of sources, ranging from travel writings and the popular press to diplomatic dispatches and official correspondence, to illustrate how influential the romance of Italy was to the bourgeois, liberal, and above all English social order during a time when class society was undergoing reconfiguration. Her use of the collective imagination as a crucial historical tool, and her emphasis on narrative as a means not only to read texts but also to understand political sources such as diplomatic documents as reflections of culture, make this a groundbreaking book which defies conventional categorization. Also included are the unique assertions that the concepts of Englishness and "England" were conceived in anything but isolation, and that neither high politics nor foreign policy may be viewed as domains separate from the forces of cultural imagination and production. A Political Romance is an innovative and interdisciplinary look at English identity and the role of Italy in its construction.

Historians today like to preach the virtues of comparison and cross-national work. In the last decade, cross-national histories have prospered, yielding important work in the subjects as diverse as the transatlantic trade in slaves and the cultures of celebrity. In the meantime, comparative history has also enjoyed a renaissance, but what is largely missing in the rush beyond the nation is any sense of how to tackle this research.
This volume brings together scholars who have worked either cross-nationally or comparatively to reflect upon their own research. In essays that engage practical, methodological, and theoretical questions, these contributors assess the gains--but also the obstacles and perils--of research that traverses national boundaries. Drawn from the subject-areas that have attracted the most comparative and cross-national attention: war, welfare, labor, nation, immigration, and gender.
Taken together, these essays provide the first critical analysis of the cross-national turn in European history.