ABSTRACT
The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 was not only a natural disaster; it also had ‘seismic’ influences on a cultural level too, with emotions of terror echoed in newspapers and broadsheet ballads across Europe. The chapter explores the history of natural disasters from the eighteenth century to the present and shows how catastrophes and their cultural ramifications have been intertwined in numerous ways. The chapter argues that Western disaster discourse is genuinely cross-temporal. Pictorial and narrative motifs and depictions of disaster scenes move across time and space and interconnect disasters with each other.
