This book investigates the narrative of nationhood during the Italian Risorgimento and its ability to reach a new and wider audience. In Italy, an extraordinary emotional excitement pervaded the struggle for national independence, suffusing the speeches and actions of patriots. This book shows how this ardour borrowed the tones, figures and spectacular nature of the melodramatic imagination feeding the theatre and literature of the time, and how it could resonate with a largely uneducated audience. An important contribution to the new historiography on the Italian Risorgimento and on nineteenth-century nationalism in Europe, it offers a fresh perspective on the public sphere during the Risorgimento, focusing on the transnational links between political mobilisation and the growth of new media and burgeoning mass culture.
Author(s): Carlotta Sorba
Series: Italian and Italian American Studies
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 316
City: Cham
Acknowledgements
Contents
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction: Emotions, Politics, Entertainment—A Nineteenth-Century Transnational Plot
Emotionality During the Risorgimento
Politics, Spectacle and Entertainment in Early Nineteenth-Century Europe
The Public Sphere During the Risorgimento: New Historical Readings
Structure of the Book
Chapter 2: Emotions for Everyone: New Entertainment Spaces in Europe
Two Beginnings
Paris, Boulevard du Temple
London, the South and the East End
From Market to Politics and Back
Republican Milan and the Idea of the Citizen-Spectator
Chapter 3: A Theatrical Genre for Post-Revolutionary Society
Looking for the Language of Emotions
The Mélodrame as Easily Accessible Entertainment
The Industry of the Melodrama
Between England and Italy: In the Footsteps of a Transnational Product
Chapter 4: Between Mélodrame and Melodramatic Imagination
Who Is Afraid of the Melodrama? The Mélo as “mover of the heart”
Melodramatic Style and Political Conflict in the Early Nineteenth Century
National Narratives
Chapter 5: Melodrama Italian-Style: In Search of an Audience Between Fiction and Politics
New Narratives of the Past Between Rossini and Walter Scott
Foscolo, Mazzini and an Audience for Politics
Towards an “Industrial Literature”?
Melodrama Italian-Style
Chapter 6: The Melodramatic Narration of Oppressed Italy
Truth and Fiction
The Narrative Device
Oppression and Redemption
From the Past to the Present: The Three Years Between 1846–1849
The History of Italy Told to the People
A Few Figures and a Little About Trade
Violence, Deceptions, Sieges: Sentimentalising Politics
The Vocabulary of Emotivity Between Colloquialisms and Archaisms
A mélo About 1848
Chapter 7: Not Just Words: Emotional Bodies in the “Long 1848”
A Theatrical Revolution
Dramatising the Past
The Role of Communicators
The Physiognomy of Patriotism
Clothes, Beards and Feathered Hats
Fashion Italian-Style
Patriots, Knights, Brigands and Robbers
An Interpretation: Between Performativity and Surveillance
Chapter 8: Politics and the Language of Sentiment
After the Emotional Storm
European Indignation
A Melodramatic Risorgimento: From Museums to Early Cinema
To Conclude
A Brief Chronology of the Italian Risorgimento
Bibliography
Periodical Sources
Printed Primary Sources
Secondary Sources
Index
