ABSTRACT
This chapter assumes that the British expatriates' identity politics in the post-Napoleonic era draw on a pre-existing cultural geography of Anglo-Italianness. The hyphenated identity Mary Shelley invents in the 1820s to legitimize the young Romantics' 'elective affinities' with the adopted country and its people is, to a degree, anticipated in the atypical inter-spaces and volatile bicultural landscapes created in the art and literature of the preceding century. Specifically, the attachment of 'Italianness' to the English identity is contingent on various discursive practices which shape its meaning and condition its function as an asset and/or a liability in relation to Englishness. An indication of the huge transformation 'Italian' and 'Italianness' have undergone in the collective imagination can be offered by a comparison between the Romantic Anglo-Italian and its sixteenth-century nominal counterpart, the Italianate Englishman. A free, powerful but unreliable and treacherous Britain symbolized the aspirations and fears of a rising Italian nation.
