Introduzione/Introduction a/to: “DOCTORS AND POETS” MUSIC, THEATER AND THE NEW PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGY BETWEEN THE 19TH AND 20TH CENTURIES

In the passage between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in reaction to the then dominant naturalist aesthetics, theater and music – which the eighteenth century had seen as the first laboratories of the soul and the emotions – began to question their essence and seek the particularity of their own status.The investigation of some of the substantial aspects of this profound cultural transformation, focused on the theatrical and musical arts, is the common feature of the contributions that constitute the volume’s core, made not only by theatrologists and musicologists, but also by philosophers, historians of medicine, psychology, linguists and exponents of neurophysiology.