Melodrama and Farce in the Tourist Resort: A Southern European Perspective

Abstract

In this article, I examine the narrative strategies of representing major transformations along Europe’s Mediterranean shores. My focus is on the beach as a contested environment in which the natural and the social, as well as the private and the communal, confront each other. I argue that contemporary Catalan, Spanish, French, Italian, and Greek novels use tourism and the hyper-urbanization of the beach as gateways to explore questions of identity, historical meaning, and the Mediterranean’s place in Europe and the world. By analyzing the tourist resort as a specific narrative site, I investigate the interplay between historical perceptions, environmental imaginings, and narrative form. Through close readings of Metin Arditi’s L’enfant qui mesurait le monde and Massimo Maugeri’s Trinacria Park, I highlight the challenges of capturing the complexity of the social construction of Southern European shores in a single narrative. While Arditi tackles the Greek crisis through melodrama and nostalgia for ruins, Maugeri traces a Sicilian island’s historical development from tragedy to farce and, eventually, disaster. Ultimately, my article seeks to contribute to a better understanding of narrative perceptions of modernization in the Euro-Mediterranean region.