Politics and Sentiments in Risorgimento Italy: Melodrama and the Nation

by Carlotta Sorba

Overview

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. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030697327
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
Publication date:	05/03/2021
Series:	Italian and Italian American Studies
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	27 MB
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About the Author

Carlotta Sorba is Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Padua and founder of the Centro interuniversitario di storia culturale (CSC), Italy. She is a cultural historian of nineteenth-century Europe with special interest in the relationship between theatre, society and politics.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Emotions, Politics, Entertainment—A Nineteenth-Century Transnational Plot.- 2. Emotions for Everyone: New Entertainment Spaces In Europe.- 3. A Theatrical Genre for Post-Revolutionary Society.- 4. Between Mélodrame and Melodramatic Imagination.- 5. Melodrama Italian-Style: In Search of an Audience Between Fiction and Politics.- 6. The Melodramatic Narration of Oppressed Italy.- 7. Not Just Words: Emotional Bodies in the "Long 1848".- 8. Politics and the Language of Sentiment.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

‘A model of how culture can be related to politics, even politics of the very highest level, this book offers a multitude of sparkling and surprising insights into melodrama, opera, and political sensibilities, not just in Italy but in France, England, and eastern Europe as well. The author’s deep learning and elegant style are bound to attract readers to this period that was so critical to the formation of modern politics.’

—Lynn Hunt, University of California, Los Angeles, USA

‘In this elegantly written and tightly focused book Carlotta Sorba provides an original explanation for the popular appeal of the Italian Risorgimento as an emotional project. By focusing on its cultural origins, this book puts the 1848 revolutionary experience in Italy back where it belongs: the European-wide rise of new media and theatrical performances. This is major contribution to our understanding of nineteenth-century European political culture.’

—Maurizio Isabella, Queen Mary University of London, UK