Ecstasy in Post-Unification Italy (1861-1915)

Abstract

The book investigates the notion of ecstasy in Italian culture and literature between 1861 and 1915. Combining historical and cultural investigation with literary analysis, it traces the circulation and spreading of ecstatic phenomena in a variety of different discourses, specifically, those related to religion, science, and ‘occulture’, and the ways they were portrayed by Italian writers of the period. Focusing on mystical ecstasies, magnetic ecstasies, mediumistic trances, hypnotic trances, and hysterical extases, it shows how ecstatic subjects were regarded as abnormal, disorderly individuals who needed to be overseen, governed, or repressed. It also discusses how prominent authors of Italian post-unification literature, namely Matilde Serao, Antonio Fogazzaro, Luigi Capuana, and Gabriele D’Annunzio, delivered literary depictions of ecstasy, finding in it a fundamental trope to explore the disorderly, inner tensions of the self, anticipating Freud’s theorizations of the unconscious and the death drive. The book proposes the existence of an ‘ecstatic Italy’ between 1861 and 1915, providing a new theoretical frame to analyse Italian modernity at a pivotal period in the country’s history. This theoretical frame uncovers a dialectical tension between, on the one hand, an ‘ecstatic dis-order’, manifesting itself through ecstatic subjectivities (mostly female) that undermined the order the establishment was striving towards, pervading it with chaos and disarray, and, on the other hand, a static order (usually masculine), exerting, through different agencies, a power of repressive and normative surveillance upon these ecstatic subjectivities, in order to maintain the cohesion and steadiness of Italian citizens and of the newly unified country.