Abstract
Strong emotions ran through the Italian Risorgimento and could be found even in the most moderate activists. An excess of passion, expressive emphasis and even violence runs through the discourses and narratives of the Risorgimento. The chapter explains that in order to understand and interpret the reasons for this, different dimensions of analysis need to interact with each other: the establishment in the eighteenth-century of a culture of sensitivity; the development of a sphere of entertainment aimed at an increasingly wider audience; the emergence of a new kind of politics, in which emotions and feelings found considerable space. To frame the overall picture and its pathways, the trajectories of the most recent historiography on the Italian Risorgimento and on the processes of political mobilisation in the early nineteenth-century Europe are brought into focus.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
J.-J. Rousseau, Pygmalion, Pimmalione, partiture del mélodrame e della scena lirica in facsimile, with an introductory essay by E. Sala, Ricordi, Milan 1996.
- 2.
See B. Manin, The Principles of Representative Government, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge-New York 1997.
- 3.
On the difficulty of writing a history of emotions, many reflections have been published in recent years that have focused on the accessibility of the emotional dimension itself and on the possible relationships between emotional discourse and practices. I only point out two Italian essays that take stock of the international debate: S. Ferente, Storici ed emozioni, in “Storica”, XV, 2009, 43–45, pp. 371–392, and R. Petri, Sentimenti, emozioni. Potenzialità e limiti della storia culturale, in “Memoria e ricerca”, 40, 2012, pp. 75–92. See also two reviews of studies: E. Sullivan, The History of Emotions: Past, Present and Future, in “Cultural History”, 2, 2013, pp. 93–102, and B. Gammerl, Transitory Feelings: On Challenges and Trends within the History of Emotions, in “Contemporanea”, 2, 2014, pp. 335–344. For a recent overview of this approach, see B.H. Rosenwein and R. Cristiani, What Is the History of Emotions?, Polity Press 2018.
- 4.
As skilfully and persuasively argued by R. Romani, Sensibilities of the Risorgimento. Reasons and Passions in Political Thought, Brill, Leiden 2018.
- 5.
It is no coincidence that the idea for this book came about when writing an essay for the Einaudi Annal devoted to the Risorgimento which paid new attention to the mental and emotional universe of the Risorgimento. See the discussion on the book edited by S. Soldani, Le emozioni del Risorgimento, in “Passato e presente”, 75, 2008, pp. 17–32.
- 6.
Unlike in France, where the first edition is from 2010, in Italy, the book was translated in the 1980s, thanks to a careful scholar and a small but excellent publishing house: P. Brooks, L’immaginazione melodrammatica, Pratiche editrice, Parma 1985 (orig. ed. The Melodramatic Imagination. Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama end the Mode of Excess, Yale University Press, New Haven and London 1976).
- 7.
On the confusion caused by the misunderstanding between the two terms, see, for example, E. Sala, In che senso “El Dorado” di Marcel L’Herbier è un “mélodrame”?, in E. Degrada (ed.), Il melodramma, Bulzoni, Rome 2007, pp. 111–144.
- 8.
From an almost embarrassing genre, excluded from literary analysis and the object of irony, in the 1980s the mélo became a subject of great interest for analysing the trajectories of mass culture, a sort of paradigm of the circularity between high and low culture and of the continuous and consistent exchanges between the cultured and popular dimensions; for some of the most important output of that season of studies, see I. Ang, Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination, Routledge, London 1985; J. Przybos, L’entreprise mélodramatique, José Corti, Paris 1987; J. Bratton, J. Cook, C. Gledhill (eds), Melodrama: Stage, Picture, Screen, British Film Institute Publishing, London 1994.
- 9.
The interview with Peter Brooks is transcribed in the appendix of B. Gallo (ed.), Forme del melodrammatico: parole e musica (1700–1800), Guerini e Associati, Milan 1988, pp. 343–356.
- 10.
For an early reaction to Peter Brooks’ book, see L. James, Taking Melodrama Seriously: Theatre and Nineteenth Century Studies, in “History Workshop”, III, 1977, 1, pp. 151–158. For an interesting critical review of the historical use of this category, see R. McWilliam, Melodrama and Historians, in “Radical History Review”, 78, 2000, pp. 57–84.
- 11.
Such an aesthetic and imaginative category allows us to approach the complex relationships between discursive representations and social practices (which prompted me to work in this area). See the very useful reflections by J. Epstein, In Practice: Studies in the Language and Culture of Popular Politics in Modern Britain, Stanford University Press, Stanford 2003. Brooks himself maintained that he was particularly interested not in melodrama as a narrative device but as a mode of expression, within the framework of an anthropological approach to literature that would recover the sense of the human context.
- 12.
On the Esf project entitled Representations of the Past: The Writing of National Histories in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Europe (Nhist), see S. Berger and A. Mycock (eds), Europe and Its National Histories, special issue of “Storia della storiografia”, L, 2006, 4. See also, for its bibliography, S. Berger, L. Eriksonas, A. Mycock (eds), Narrating the Nation: Representations in History, Media and the Arts, Berghan Books, New York–Oxford 2008.
- 13.
In Guy Debord (The society of Spectacle, Detroit, Black § Red 1983, orig. ed. 1967), the term was synonymous with an excessive and boundless consumerist society, ultimately of commodification of the world. For a historical contextualisation of the book and its fortune, see the catalogue of the exhibition recently organised with the material from Debord’s archive: E. Guy and L. Le Bras (eds), Guy Debord. Un art de la guerre, Éditions de la Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Gallimard, Paris 2013.
- 14.
For important contributions on the visual aspects of nineteenth-century media developments, see V. Fiorino, G.L. Fruci, A. Petrizzo (eds), Il lungo Ottocento e le sue immagini. Politica, media, spettacolo, Ets, Pisa 2013.
- 15.
A significant step forward in this direction is C. Charle, Théâtres en capitales. Naissance de la société du spectacle à Paris, Berlin, Londres et Viennes, Albin Michel, Paris 2008; and also Ibid. (ed.), Sociétés du spectacle, monographic issue of “Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales”, 186–187, 2011.
- 16.
On the development of performance studies and on the focus they place on the theme of spectacle and spectacularity, see the introduction to S. Goldhill and R. Osborne (eds), Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge-New York 1999; for a more recent overview of performance and historical studies, see S. Gunn, Analysing Behaviour as Performance, in S. Gunn and L. Faire (eds), Research Methods for History, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 2012, pp. 184–202.
- 17.
See Leisure cultures in Urban Europe, c 1700–1870 (ed. by P. Borsay and J.H. Furnee), Manchester University Press, Manchester 2016.
- 18.
C.A. Sainte-Beuve, De la littérature industrielle, in “Revue des deux mondes”, September 1839, now in Ibid., Pour la critique, edited by A. Prassoloff and J.L. Diaz, Gallimard, Paris 1992, pp. 197–222.
- 19.
F.-R. de Chateubriand, Itinéraire de Paris à Jerusalem et de Jerusalem à Paris, Impr. de Béthune et Plon, Paris 1839, pp. 1–2.
- 20.
Modernity is by definition an unstable and poorly definable concept. In historiography, we continue to think about it, but we tend to distinguish the specificities of nineteenth-century modernity (the one we will talk about here) from the twentieth-century one; for an example of comparative analysis, see J. Seigel, Modernity and Bourgeois Life: Society, Politics and Culture in England, France and Germany since 1750, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2012.
- 21.
G. Pécout, Una crociera nel Mediterraneo con Garibaldi, in A. Dumas, Viva Garibaldi, Einaudi, Turin 2004, pp. vi–xxi; J.-Y. Mollier, Alexandre Dumas et la littérature industrielle, in Dumas. Une lecture de l’histoire, edited by M. Arrous, Maisonneuve et Larose, Paris 2003, pp. 135–152.
- 22.
An obligatory reference is L. Riall, Garibaldi. Invention of a Hero, Yale University Press, New Haven and London 2007, who has reconstructed the media dimension of the so-called Hero of the Two Worlds.
- 23.
J. Davis and M. Riva (eds), Mediating the Risorgimento, monographic issue of “Journal of Modern Italian Studies”, XVIII, 2013, 2; C.A. Bayly and E.F. Biagini (eds), Giuseppe Mazzini and the Globalisation of Democratic Nationalism 1830–1920, British Academy, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2008.
- 24.
D. Kalifa (ed.), Les noms d’époque. De “Restauration” à “années de plomb”, Gallimard, Paris 2020.
- 25.
For an overview of this research area, see S. Patriarca and L. Riall (eds), Risorgimento Revisited: Nationalism and Culture in Nineteenth Century Italy, Palgrave Macmillan, London 2012; M. Isabella, Rethinking Italy’s Nation-Building 150 Years Afterwards: The New Risorgimento Historiography, in “Past and present”, 217, 2012, pp. 247–268; A.M. Banti, A. Chiavistelli, L. Mannori and M. Meriggi (eds), Atlante culturale del Risorgimento. Lessico del linguaggio politico dal Settecento all’Unità, Laterza, Rome-Bari 2011.
- 26.
See O. Janz and L. Riall (eds), The Italian Risorgimento: Transnational Perspectives, special issue of “Modern Italy”, XIX, 2014, 1; G. Pécout, Pour une lecture méditérranéenne et transnationale du Risorgimento, in C. Brice and G. Pécout (eds), L’Italie du Risorgimento. Relectures, in “Revue d’histoire du XIX siècle”, 44, 2012, pp. 29–47.
- 27.
An attempt at investigations in this direction has been started by some historians of French literature such as M.-E. Thérenty and A. Vaillant, who have suggested a research agenda on the history of literary communication as part of a more general framework of history of the forms of communication and their interactions; see Histoire littéraire et histoire culturelle, in L. Martin e S. Venayre, L’histoire culturelle du contemporain, Actes du colloque de Cerisy, Nouveau monde éditions, Paris 2005, pp. 271–290.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Sorba, C. (2021). Introduction: Emotions, Politics, Entertainment—A Nineteenth-Century Transnational Plot. In: Politics and Sentiments in Risorgimento Italy. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69732-7_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69732-7_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-69731-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-69732-7
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)