Pompeii in the Public Imagination from Its Rediscovery to Today

Front Cover
Shelley Hales, Joanna Paul
OUP Oxford, Nov 17, 2011 - History - 417 pages
The city of Pompeii has had an enormous impact on Western imaginations since its rediscovery under the ashes of the volcano that destroyed it in 79 CE. In the 250 years since excavations began, Pompeii has helped to bring the ancient world to life for everyone, from music hall audiences to gentleman scholars, and it continues to have an impact on the way in which we think about the past, and the human condition itself. The contributors to this generously illustrated volume, who include the novelist Robert Harris, in a recorded interview, investigate how Pompeii has been used in film, fiction, and art on both sides of the Atlantic over three centuries. They explore the many different ways in which Pompeii inhabits our imaginations: as ghostly relic of human suffering, romantic ruin, model of cultural inspiration, home of a distant, decadent culture, and comforting model for everyday life.
 

Contents

Ruins and Reconstructions
1
Goethes Repeated Approaches to Pompeii
15
William Beckford as a Visitor to Pompeii
34
Plinys Letters to Tacitus and Angelica Kauffmanns Pliny the Younger and his Mother at Misenum
48
Pompeii and Vesuvius in Corinne or Italy
62
Recreating the City
75
Necromantic Pathos in BulwerLyttons City of the Dead
90
Souvenir de Pompéi
105
15 Experiencing the Last Days of Pompeii in Late NineteenthCentury Philadelphia
215
16 In Search of Lost Time and Pompeii
232
Vittorio Spinazzola and the Via dellAbbondanza
246
Art Architecture and Aristocratic SelfFashioning in the MidTwentieth Century
270
19 Pompeii in Roberto Rossellinis Journey to Italy
286
20 The Censorship Myth and the Secret Museum
301
Looking at Looking in Pompeiis Brothel and the Secret Cabinet
316
An Interview with Robert Harris
331

Chassériaus Pompeii in NineteenthCentury Paris
118
10 Italian ClassicalRevival Painters and the Southern Question
136
11 Cities of the Dead
153
12 Christians and Jews at Pompeii in Late NineteenthCentury Fiction
171
Freudian Archaeology
185
The Last Days of Pompeii in the Early American Republic
199
23 Pompeii the Holocaust and the Second World War
340
24 Pompeii and the Cambridge Latin Course
356
The Case of Herculaneum
367
Bibliography
380
Index
413
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