ROMANTIC ANGLO-ITALIANS

332 Pages·2006·0.82 MB·English

ROMANTIC ANGLO-ITALIANS:
CONFIGURATIONS OF IDENTITY IN BYRON, THE SHELLEYS,
AND THE PISAN CIRCLE

by
Maria Schoina

A dissertation submitted to the Department of English Literature and Culture,
School of English, Faculty of Philosophy,
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece

In fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

2005
Maria Schoina

Romantic Anglo-Italians:
Configurations of Identity in Byron, the Shelleys,
and the Pisan Circle

Doctoral Dissertation

submitted to the Department of English Language and Literature,
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Date of Oral Defence: 11 January 2005

Dissertation Committee:

Prof. Ekaterini Douka-Kabitoglou, Adviser

Prof. Karin Boklund-Lagopoulou, Co-Adviser

Prof. Ruth Parkin-Gounelas, Co-Adviser

Assoc. Prof. Litsa Trayiannoudi, Examiner
Prof. Yiorgos Kalogeras, Examiner
Assist. Prof. Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou, Examiner
Assoc. Prof. Phivos Ghikopoulos, Examiner
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Acknowledgements
Many people have inspired, helped, challenged, and supported me during the four and a
half years that I have worked on this dissertation and it is a great pleasure to have this
opportunity to thank them. I am deeply grateful to my supervisor Dr. Ekaterini Douka
Kabitoglou for her invaluable critical guidance and unfailing interest from the first conception of
this project to its final revisions. Above all, I wish to thank her for kindling the “flame” and for
strongly encouraging a shy, reticent undergraduate’s bid, back in 1994, to write a term paper on
Blake’s artistic expression and one on Keats’s Odes. I thank her for many wonderful classes and
thought-provoking sessions, for her warm intelligence, her generosity of spirit, and her
unadulterated love for poetry. Last but not least, I thank her for her numerous perceptive
readings of the chapters that follow, as well as for providing me with so much love and support
along the way and for boosting my faith at critical moments.
I am indebted to my co-adviser Dr. Karin Boklund Lagopoulou for her insightful and
thorough commentary at various stages during the planning, research and composition of this
dissertation. I owe her thanks for her enthusiasm in the project from the start, as well as for her
practical advice on a number of matters. I wish to thank deeply my co-adviser Dr. Ruth Parkin
Gounelas who, with infinite kindness and patience, listened to me talk through new ideas,
generated tough challenges on the reading of texts, encouraged theoretical rigor, read individual
chapters with great care and a remarkable critical eye, and offered many stimulating
conversations about Mary Shelley. I am also grateful to the four members of the defence
committee, Dr. Litsa Trayiannoudi, Dr. Yiorgos Kalogeras, Dr. Katerina Kitsi Mitakou, and Dr.
Phivos Ghikopoulos for reading the dissertation with insight, for asking probing questions, and
for making perceptive, improving comments.
Two people provided me with significant study and research guidelines in the field of
Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations at the very start of this project: Prof. Jonathan Cook, my
research supervisor at the University of East Anglia, and the author and biographer Richard
ii

Holmes. The latter uncannily foresaw the emergence of something larger than an MA thesis in
the long drafts and numerous questions I presented him with back in 1999 in Norwich, as well as
in my fascination with the complex implementation of biculturality by the expatriate British
Romantics in Italy.
My dissertation research has enormously benefited from a memorable six-month visit to
the University of Bologna in Italy, funded by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Prof. Lilla
Maria Crisafulli, director of the Centro Interdisciplinare degli Studi Romantici in Bologna not
only welcomed me warmly as a member of the group, but helped me locate important sources
and gain access to libraries and collections in Pisa, Florence and Rome. I thank her for her
unflagging generosity, both intellectual and personal. I am grateful too to Professors Timothy
Webb and Michael O’Neill for many inspiring conversations during these last four years, for
their enthusiasm in the project from the start, and for responding so promptly and insightfully to
all my urgent mails. Both of them were influential and opened my eyes to nuances in “things
Anglo-Italian”. Roderick Cavaliero from a distance has been not only a good friend and a caterer
for out-of-print books and off-prints but also an engaging and critical reader, generously sharing
his deep historical knowledge about the Romantic period.
Opportunities to present the arguments and parts of the chapters from this dissertation at
conferences have been extremely helpful. Interchanges with Romanticists in Greece and abroad
have significantly shaped the intellectual life of this project and I owe especial thanks to all those
distinguished scholars whose seminal work is a constant source of inspiration for me and whose
comments and advice on my work were invaluable.
Financial support for this project has been provided by the Greek State Scholarship
Foundation between 2000-2002. The Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs offered a generous
research scholarship, and Aristotle University of Thessaloniki granted a bursary and partly
funded some of the conference trips. A bursary from The European Society for the Study of
English (ESSE) significantly defrayed the cost of my short sojourn in the States while the North
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American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR) kindly offered travel grants for
participation in its last two international conferences, 2003 and 2004 respectively.
My greatest source of emotional support for this project has come from my family and
friends. My parents Christos and Stamatia have always provided steadfast support of every kind,
particularly during the last critical months when encouragement and affection were sorely
needed. This dissertation is dedicated to them, as a token of my gratitude and love. My brother
Vassilis has supported me in different, but equally important ways: his love, guidance, optimism,
exuberance and good humour have helped sustain me in ways that are hard for me to express
adequately. My sister-in-law Helen has also been unwavering in her support. My friend and
colleague Eleftheria Arapoglou helped me survive the rigors and anxieties of research and
writing, and offered numerous critical and perceptive comments on early drafts. In Eleftheria I
found the most intellectually lively and creative of colleagues and I thank her deeply for these
four years of true, “Romantic” fellowship at its most congenial. Irene Psomiadou and Evgenia
Vlachou have provided me with necessary distractions along the way and have been inestimably
caring, sympathetic, patient and willing to help.
Finally, this dissertation is affectionately dedicated to my nephew Christos, whose birth
in spring 2003 endowed the ensuing months of my work with a livelier imagination, despite the
increasingly demanding circumstances; an endearing child whose “fingers make early flowers of
/ all things”.
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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 relevance 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.
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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.
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ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1. British Connoisseurs in Rome, by James Russel page 61
Figure 2. Roma Antica, by Giovanni Antonio Panini 62
Figure 3. Bacino di San Marco with the Bucintoro on Ascension Day, by Canaletto 65
Figure 4. Westminster Bridge, London, with the Lord Mayor’s Procession
on the Thames, by Canaletto 65
Figure 5. London: Saint Paul’s and Old London Bridge, by Antonio Joli 67
Figure 6. Prospect of London from a Colonnade with St. Paul’s and Old London
Bridge, by Antonio Joli 67
Figure 7. Capriccio: St. Paul’s and a Venetian Canal, by William Marlow 71
Figure 8. Entrance to Pisa from Leghorn, by Sir Augustus Wall Callcott 241
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ABBREVIATIONS AND SHORT TITLES

BLJ Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie Marchand, 12 vols. (London: John
Murray, 1973-1982).
BP Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980-1993).
EI “The English in Italy”, The Mary Shelley Reader, eds. Betty T. Bennett and
Charles Robinson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
L The Liberal: Verse and Prose from the South, 2 vols., 4 issues (London: John
Hunt, 1822-1823. Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur
Universität Salzburg, 1978).
MI “Modern Italy”, The Mary Shelley Reader, eds. Betty T. Bennett and
Charles Robinson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
MWSJ The Journals of Mary Shelley 1814-1844, eds. Paula Feldman and Diana Scott-
Kilvert, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
MWSL The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Betty T. Bennett, 3 vols.
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980).
PBSL The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederic L. Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1964).
Poems Shelley: Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1971).
Prose Shelley’s Prose or the Trumpet of a Prophesy, ed. David Lee Clark
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1954).
Rambles Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843, The Novels and Selected
Works of Mary Shelley, gen. ed. Nora Crook with Pamela Clemit, 8 vols.
(London: William Pickering, 1996), vol. 8: Travel Writing, Index, ed. Jeanne
Moskal.
RI “Recollections of Italy”, The Mary Shelley Reader, eds. Betty T. Bennett and
Charles Robinson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
TC “The Choice”, The Journals of Mary Shelley 1814-1844, vol. 2, pp. 490-494.
VB “A Visit to Brighton”, The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, gen. ed.
Nora Crook with Pamela Clemit, 8 vols. (London: William Pickering, 1996), vol.
2: Matilda, Dramas, Reviews & Essays, Prefaces and Notes, ed. Pamela Clemit.
viii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction
Roots, Routes, and Hyphens: Reconsidering Romantic Identity
i.“A well-informed, clever, and active race”………………………………………………….1
ii. Culture, place, identity, politics ...…………………………………………………………7
iii. Italy and the British Romantics ………………………………………………………… 19
Notes ………………………………………………………………………………………. 30

Chapter 1
Anglo-Italian Spaces and Metaphors in the Cultural Discourse of the Late Eighteenth
and Early Nineteenth Century
1.1 A Tale of Two Countries ……………………………………………………………….. 33
1.2 Cities of the Mind: Venice and London in Late Eighteenth-Century
Capriccio Paintings ………………………………………………………………………… 58
1.3 “Melancholy feelings expressed […] with Italian imagination” in Germaine
de Staël’s Corinne, or Italy ………………………………………………………………… 78
Notes ……………………………………………………………………………………….. 87

Chapter 2
Mary Shelley, Anglo-Italicus: Female Self-Assertion and the Politics of Distinction
2.1 Identity Re-construction and the Uses of Betweenness ………………………………... 94
2.2 Mapping the Anglo-Italian Paradigm in the Reviews and in Rambles ………………… 106
Notes ……………………………………………………………………………………… 145

Chapter 3
“My heart is all meridian”: Byron and the Poetics of Acculturation
3.1 “To see men and things as they are”: The Discourse of Authenticity in
Post-Napoleonic Travel Writing ………………………………………………………….. 152
3.2 “Out of love with your Nativity”: Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage IV, “To the Po”,
Beppo, The Prophecy of Dante ……………………………………………………………168

Notes ……………………………………………………………………………………….. 211