"Ein oedes und trauriges, aber grossartiges Bild". Sublimi visioni di Cagliari nella letteratura di lingua tedesca

V. Serra

2019-01-01

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Abstract

The island of Sardinia has inspired several literary works in literature in the German language, such as travel reports, journals, novels, lyrics and short stories, ever since the 18th century. This literary corpus has been studied according to different approaches and especially from a comparative point of view, which underlines the perception of the Other through a series of self-images and hetero-images that reveal much about the original culture. This paper focuses on the image that German-speaking travellers and writers have given of Cagliari over the centuries by means of a more or less explicit restoration of the aesthetic category of the sublime. These descriptions of the island’s capital show how appropriately transfigured mechanisms have caused the literary perception of the city to change considerably over the centuries from a mythical transfiguration extremely close to a locus amoenus to the construction of an image that nowadays is still linked to the aesthetic of the sublime. Thus, the asymmetric– and in this sense certainly exotic – dimension of the city in the contemporary world is spotlighted.