A «polymodal commodity experience», as recently styled by Nicholas Daly, the volcano spectacles, paintings, plays and narrative fictions that began materializing in late eighteenth-century Britain and Europe, to flourish in the nineteenth century and persist well into the twentieth, offer room for reflection on the modes of transmutation these «disaster narratives» enact between the material and the symbolic. Historical change is powerfully signified in the eruptive activity of the flaming mountain that overflowed the London stage in particular, from the 1820s throughout the central decades of the nineteenth century; its political topicality was fully to emerge at the height of the historical phase we have come to know as the Italian Risorgimento. In this paper I shall consider a segment of this track of cultural history, and a number of texts, mostly but not exclusively written for the stage, as exemplifications of both an aesthetic mode and a political mood.
«All in silence mounts the lava»: volcanic imagery and politics, 1820-1872
DELLAROSA, Franca
2013-01-01
Abstract
A «polymodal commodity experience», as recently styled by Nicholas Daly, the volcano spectacles, paintings, plays and narrative fictions that began materializing in late eighteenth-century Britain and Europe, to flourish in the nineteenth century and persist well into the twentieth, offer room for reflection on the modes of transmutation these «disaster narratives» enact between the material and the symbolic. Historical change is powerfully signified in the eruptive activity of the flaming mountain that overflowed the London stage in particular, from the 1820s throughout the central decades of the nineteenth century; its political topicality was fully to emerge at the height of the historical phase we have come to know as the Italian Risorgimento. In this paper I shall consider a segment of this track of cultural history, and a number of texts, mostly but not exclusively written for the stage, as exemplifications of both an aesthetic mode and a political mood.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
