A SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY THROUGH ITALY

Abstract

The paper paraphrases Sterne’s title in an effort to map the work of four English and American writers: Willa Cather, Laurence Sterne, Muriel Spark, Gore Vidal as it tracks their actual journeys to the capital of Italy and projects these journeys into their work. The locations have been researched in situ with reference to documents and summarizing and complementing existing data, mostly in their correspondence. The real journey and the literary journey, sources and literary facts are the parameters of the ‘journey’and it is enhanced in a Bulgarian ‘road’ where the work of these authors has travelled through translation.