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Attila and Verdi's historical imagination
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 October 2010
Abstract
This is a study of the primo ottocento Italian literary and historical vogue for conquerors and conquered peoples, and in particular how the fifth-century Attila became a paradigmatic figure to those involved with the Risorgimento, including Verdi and Solera.
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References
(translated by Daniel Donnelly)
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3 Attila in Aquileia, also drawn from Werner's play, was composed by Giuseppe Persiani in 1827, while in the 1830s and 1840s a number of barbarian subjects (Alboini, Rosmunde, Ildegonde) were taken up as tragedies or melodramas on the Italian stage.
4 I refer in particular to the recent work of Ian Wood, who has attempted to connect the two areas of study by proposing a very convincing picture of the use of the Migration Period (AD c. 300–800) in the political discourse of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. See Wood, Ian, ‘The Use and Abuse of the Early Middle Ages, 1750–2000’, in The Making of the Middle Ages, ed. Costambeys, Marios, Hamer, Andrew and Heale, Martin (Liverpool, 2007), 36–53Google Scholar .
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16 It has been noted that despite the success of her essays and books and the anticipatory character of her intuition, de Staël would never herself form a part of this Olympic pantheon. See Gutwirth, Madelyn, Madame de Staël, Novelist: The Emergence of the Artist as Woman (Urbana, 1978)Google Scholar .
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