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

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 i 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 iii 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”. iv 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. v 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),

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