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Delights Of Posillipo, Terrors Of Vesuvius: Music, Spectacle, And Identity In Early Modern Naples, Nathan Kent Reeves

Masters Theses

This thesis examines musico-dramatic activities centered at the Spanish viceregal court of Naples during the years 1608-1630 and positions them as reflective of shifting socio-political practices occurring in the cultural milieu of the city in the seventeenth century. I argue that three spectacles written by the writer and courtier Giambattista Basile expose emergent Neapolitan identities within the colonial society of Spanish-occupied Naples. Utilizing Mary Louise Pratt’s (1991) concept of the contact zone, I read these works as instances of autoethnography, a medium involving a conscious blending of forms and idioms, necessitating both negotiation and collaboration between cultures of the occupant …