AustLit

'... The exegesis considers women's journeys to Naples in Roberto Rossellini's film Journey to Italy, Shirley Hazzard's novella The Bay of Noon and Mario Martone's film L'amore molesto. It examines how setting can elicit similar stories and comparable sets of representational concerns, tracing intertextual relationships between Rossellini's influential film and the other two texts, and locating these journeys inside wider contexts such as the Grand Tour, the motif of the heroine transformed by Italy, the construction of the Italian South as Other, and the long association between Naples and the feminine. It locates and traces a Vesuvian narrative from outsider to insider views that posits the central paradox of Naples as a site of catastrophe and a space that offers each heroine the chance of self-reconstruction. I argue in readings of the three texts that the central female protagonists turn inwards away from the famous panorama of the Bay of Naples to investigate ruined spaces and radical sites of anti-spectacle.' (Trove record for the thesis)