Rereading Samuel Rogers' I taly: The Transitional Textual-Visual Space

This essay examines Samuel Rogers' reissued Italy with steel-engraved illustrations in 1830 as a transitional artifact which caters to the new trend of the publishing of travel writing with illustrations which emerged in the 1830s. The essay argues that Rogers' Italy was illustrative of a shift from a pictorial and verbal form to a photographic and linguistic mode, as developed by the Pre-Raphaelites and photographic illustrations in the Victorian era. First, the essay investigates the literary value of Rogers' Italy in the context of post-Napoleonic tourism, and it explores why Rogers reissued Italy in relation to the progress and the vicissitudes of visual culture in the nineteenth century. While attempting to interpret and analyze "The Feluca" and "Paestum" in Italy, the essay goes on to argue how Rogers strategically enhanced the poetic visual effect with his unusual approach to sister arts, consolidating his emotive, meditative travel poems with Turner's proto-photographic illustrations. Although Rogers was an old poet and even demonized as an anachronism poet, the essay argues that as a modern poet, he was never behind the times in anticipating the modern artist forms.