The Volcanic Disaster Narrative: From Pleasure Garden to Canvas, Page, and Stage

This essay surveys the volcano spectacles, paintings, plays, and narratives that appear at the end of the eighteenth century, thrive in the nineteenth, and live on well into the twentieth. Moving amphibiously between popular and high culture, this polymodal ““commodity experience”” imagines historic...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Victorian studies 2011, Vol.53 (2), p.255-285
Main Author:	Daly, Nicholas
Format:	Article
Language:	eng
Subjects:	1800-1899 19th century Apocalypticism Archaeology Audience Authors Cross-Media disaster Disasters Disasters in literature Drama English Literature Entertainment Eschatology France history History and criticism Literary criticism literary studies Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron (1803-1873) Narrative art Narrative poetry Narratives Natural Disasters Nineteenth Century Novels Pleasure Politics Revolutions Surveys The Last Days of Pompeii Theater Victorian period Victorian studies Victorian studies, history, literary studies Victorians volcanic eruption Volcanoes Volcanoes in literature
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Summary:	This essay surveys the volcano spectacles, paintings, plays, and narratives that appear at the end of the eighteenth century, thrive in the nineteenth, and live on well into the twentieth. Moving amphibiously between popular and high culture, this polymodal ““commodity experience”” imagines historical change as catastrophe, and projects the modern into the past and the forces of modernity onto the natural world. Its ability to absorb political content in part underwrites the success of the volcano story, and in such nineteenth-century versions as Edward Lytton Bulwer'sThe Last Days of Pompeii(1834), the volcano is identified with the crowd and with revolution. But alongside the political allegory, a more basic audience delight in destruction itself seems part of the lingering power of the volcano.
ISSN:	0042-5222 1527-2052 1527-2052