ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book traces affinities between pre-nineteenth-century Anglo-Italian imaginative geographies and the figure of the Romantic Anglo-Italian. It argues that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, a significant part of the British cultural discourse registers the Anglo-Italian encounter in the form of hybridised spaces, identities, and narrative forms. The book explores the textual origins and evolution of the Anglo-Italian in Mary Shelley's writings. It deals with a brief consideration of her travelogue Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843 in order to show how the figure evolves through time and how Mary Shelley's last work, in an instance of self-assessment, projects a critique of in-betweenness. The book also argues that Shelley's relation to the social, economic, and political space of Pisa evidences an 'egocentric structuring'.
