Pompeii in the Public Imagination from Its Rediscovery to Today

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.1. Introduction: Ruins and Reconstructions ; 2. A Tamed 'desire for images': Goethe's Repeated Approaches to Pompeii ; 3. Ruined Waking Thoughts: William Beckford as a Visitor to Pompeii ; 4. Making History: Pliny's Letters to Tacitus and Angelica Kauffman's 'Pliny and his Mother at Misenum' ; 5. Site, Sight, and Symbol: Pompeii and Vesuvius in 'Corinne, or Italy' ; 6. Bulwer-Lytton's The Last Days of Pompeii: Recreating the City ; 7. Objects of Affection: Necromantic Pathos in Bulwer-Lytton's City of the Dead ; 8. Delusion and Dream in Theophile Gautier's 'Arria Marcella: Souvenir de Pompei' ; 9. Archaeology Meets Fantasy: Chasseriau's Pompeii in Nineteenth-Century Paris ; 10. Italian Classical Revival Painters and the 'Southern Question' ; 11. Cities of the Dead ; 12. Christians and Jews at Pompeii in Late Nineteenth-Century Fiction ; 13. Rocks, Ghosts and Footprints: Freudian Archaeology ; 14. On the Edge of the Volcano: 'The Last Days of Pompeii' in the Early American Republic ; 15. Experiencing The Last Days of Pompeii in Late Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia ; 16. In Search of Lost Time and Pompeii ; 17. Excavation Photographs and the Imagining of Pompeii's Streets: Vittorio Spinazzola and the Via dell'Abbondanza ; 18. The Getty Villa: Art, Architecture, and Aristocratic Self-Fashioning in the Mid-Twentieth Century ; 19. Pompeii in Roberto Rossellini's 'Journey to Italy' ; 20. The Censorship Myth and the Secret Museum ; 21. Modern Tourists, Ancient Sexualities: Looking at Looking in Pompeii's Brothel and the Secret Cabinet ; 22. Writing Pompeii: An Interview with Robert Harris ; 23. Pompeii, the Holocaust, and World War Two ; 24. Pompeii and the Cambridge Latin Course ; 25. Ruins and Forgetfulness: The Case of Herculaneum