D isaster narratives recur in the high and popular culture of the nineteenth century, appearing in narrative fiction, poetry, drama, opera, fine-art history, and landscape painting, as well as in more spectacular popular forms. the events of such narratives turn on the annihilation of people and property; their structures are characterized by the interruption of narrative continuity; and their philosophy generally suggests the limitations of human powers and the inevitable frustration of schemes and hopes. we are familiar with disaster narratives as a component of our own international popular culture, with the disaster film a particularly recognizable genre that has shed its B-movie connotations to become a major strain of the bigbudget Hollywood blockbuster (a term with its own echoes of wholesale destruction). All such narratives share a relatively under-theorized aesthetic element: the pleasure of the reader or viewer in destruction-of people, of property, of hopes. while this pleasure may have something in common with the pity and terror evoked by Aristotelian tragedy, we might also speculate that enjoyment of such scenes is rooted in the subject's aggressive drives, whether or not one sees that aggression as the outward projection of an innate Freudian deathdrive. Yet while there are evident continuities, our familiarity with contemporary disaster narratives may mislead. in twentieth-and twentyfirst-century disaster texts the interest often resides in the post-disaster Abstract: this essay surveys the volcano spectacles, paintings, plays, and narratives that appear at the end of the eighteenth century, thrive in the nineteenth, and live on well into the twentieth. Moving amphibiously between popular and high culture, this polymodal "commodity experience" imagines historical change as catastrophe, and projects the modern into the past and the forces of modernity onto the natural world. its ability to absorb political content in part underwrites the success of the volcano story, and in such nineteenth-century versions as edward Lytton Bulwer's The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), the volcano is identified with the crowd and with revolution. But alongside the political allegory, a more basic audience delight in destruction itself seems part of the lingering power of the volcano.