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

Abstract

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's The 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.