Romantic Anglo-Italians: configurations of identity in Byron, the Shelleys and the Pisan circle

Abstract

My dissertation discusses the identity and spatial politics of post-Napoleonic British expatriates in Italy, recovering the discursive techniques employed in their identification with Italinanness and assessing the rele vance of such activities in the context of the dominant themes and preoccupations in Romantic culture. More specifically, I assert that the so-called “Anglo- Italians” – defined by Mary Shelley as “a well- informed, active and clever race” in her review essay “The English in Italy” (1826) – fashioned a hyphenated identity and displayed varied degrees of identification with Italianness, in an attempt to establish a bicultural sensibility, and, thus, an alternative coalition with “foreigness”, namely, with Italian place, culture, language, and community. In my opinion, the professed mission of these acculturated literati to “Italianise” their compatriots at home and “to disseminate among them a portion of that taste and knowledge acquired in the peninsula” suggests the distinctive role Anglo-Italians wished to play in the construction of cultural and political models for British society. My contention is that Mary Shelley’s qualifications designate a complex identification with Italy and Italianness, and can retrospectively offer some insight into the identity politics of the Pisan circle in particular, and of the British emigrants in Italy in general, and cast further light on the discursive nature of this eccentric self- representation. Considering that the fashioning of special identities is historically contingent, I argue that the emergence and “mission” of the Anglo-Italian is inextricably linked to the social, political, economic, and cultural conditions of the age: the forging of the British identity in the midst of an expanding empire, the rise of the English middle-class and the establishment of a competitive print culture, and the envisioning, by a group of male and female Romantic liberal intellectuals, of a social and political reform. In view of the importance and currency Italy had assumed in the British consciousness after the Napoleonic wars, the “mobilisation” of Italianness into the construction of a hyphenated self-representation has, in my opinion, considerable political hold. Assuming a cultural- geographical approach, and drawing on the theoretical insights of Stuart Hall, Michel Foucault, Edward Said and Pierre Bourdieu, my work revolves around the construction of identity in relation to place(s), culture(s), and travelling (routes), and sets out to explore the ambivalences, fluctuations, and modalities which underpin the fashioning of the Anglo-Italian. In other words, and as revealed through a number of texts of the period – poetry, prose, visual culture and journalistic discourse – the imagined nature of this Romantic configuration does not undermine its discursive effectivity: hence the crucial connection between figuring and configuring an identity. It is in this context that I attempt a re-evaluation of Byron’s “all meridian” heart, Percy Shelley’s “Pisan roots”, Mary Shelley’s “Anglo-Italicus” self – cast as a strategy of gender distinction – and of the “Italianised Cockney” vestiture of The Liberal. My close reading of their selected texts (e.g. Shelley’s Italian review of Sgricci’s improvisation, Byron’s The Prophecy of Dante, Mary Shelley’s reviews, Leigh Hunt’s Letters from Abroad) suggests that the Romantic expatriates’ investment in the Italian culture is significantly informed, but also complicated, by this professed in-betweenness. The first chapter traces the origins of this hybrid identity and looks at some of its manifestations in the art and literature of the late 18th and early 19th century. The second chapter examines Mary Shelley’s Anglo-Italianness, as this is revealed in her less well-known reviews, essays, letters, and her travelogue Rambles in Germany and Italy (1843). Another chapter focuses on Byron, and looks at his Anglo-Italian discourse with particular reference to his poems Beppo, “To the Po” and The Prophecy of Dante, but also considers other Anglo-Italians who employ rhetorical strategies similar to Byron’s. My last chapter attempts a contextualised reinterpretation of the Pisan circle, with particular emphasis on Shelley, as well as on Leigh Hunt and the related publication of The Liberal.