Ecstasy in Post-Unification Italy (1861-1915)

The book investigates the notion of ecstasy in Italian culture and literature from the country's unification in 1861 to its entry into World War I in 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 in which 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 in need to be overseen, governed, or repressed. It also discusses how some of the most 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 the latter a fundamental trope to explore the disorderly, inner tensions of the self, anticipating Freud's theorisations of the unconscious and the death drive. Ultimately, the book proposes the existence of an 'ecstatic Italy' between 1861 and 1915, providing a new theoretical frame to analyse Italian modernity in a pivotal period in the country's history. This theoretical frame is condensed in the expression 'ecstatic dis-order' which refers to a dialectical tension between, on the one hand, an ecstatic disorder, 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.

Frances Clemente is Turpin Junior Research Fellow at Oriel College and Lecturer in Italian at St Hilda's College. Her research focuses on nineteenth and twentieth century Italian culture and literature. She is particularly interested in notions of otherness and how they relate to normative patterns of thinking and behaving.