Venice Desired
Title | Venice Desired PDF eBook |
Author | Tony Tanner |
Publisher | Harvard University Press |
Pages | 428 |
Release | 1992 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 9780674933125 |
If there is one city that might be said to embody both reason and desire, it would surely be Venice: a thousand-year triumph of rational legislation, aesthetic and sensual self-expression, and self-creation--powerful, lovely, serene. Unique in so many ways, Venice is also unique in its relation to writing. London has Dickens, Paris has Balzac, Saint Petersburg has Dostoevsky, Dublin has Joyce, but there is simply no comparable writer for, or out of, Venice. Venice effectively disappeared from history altogether in 1797 after its defeat by Napoleon. From then on, it seemed to exist as a curiously marooned spectacle. Literally marooned--the city mysteriously growing out of the sea, the beautiful stone impossibly floating on water--but temporally marooned as well, stagnating outside history. Yet as spectacle, as the beautiful city par excellence, the city of art, the city as art and as spectacular example, as the greatest and richest republic in the history of the world, now declined and fallen, Venice became an important site for the European imagination. Watery, dark, silent, a place of sensuality and secrecy; of masks and masquerading; of an always possibly treacherous beauty; of Desdemona and Iago, Shylock, Volpone; of conspiracy and courtesans in Otway; an obvious setting for many Gothic novels--Venice is not written from the inside but variously appropriated from without. Venice--the place, the name, the dream--seems to lend itself to a whole variety of appreciations, recuperations, and and hallucinations. In decay and decline, yet saturated with secret sexuality--suggesting a heady compound of death and desire--Venice becomes for many writers what is was for Byron: both "the greenest island of my imagination" and a "sea-sodom." It also, as this book tries to show, plays a crucial role in the development of modern writing. Tanner skillfully lays before us the many ways in which this dreamlike city has been summoned up, depicted, dramatized--then rediscovered or transfigured in selected writings through the years.
Venice Desired
Title | Venice Desired PDF eBook |
Author | Tony Tanner |
Publisher | Wiley-Blackwell |
Pages | 384 |
Release | 1992 |
Genre | English literature |
ISBN | 9780631155539 |
Venice and the Cultural Imagination
Title | Venice and the Cultural Imagination PDF eBook |
Author | Michael O'Neill |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 236 |
Release | 2015-10-06 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1317322592 |
In the era of the Grand Tour, Venice was the cultural jewel in the crown of Europe and the epitome of decadence. This edited collection of eleven essays draws on a range of disciplines and approaches to ask how Venice’s appeal has affected Western culture since 1800.
The Venice Myth
Title | The Venice Myth PDF eBook |
Author | David Barnes |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 217 |
Release | 2015-10-06 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1317317505 |
Venice holds a unique place in literary and cultural history. Barnes looks at the themes of war, occupation, resistance and fascism to see how the political background has affected the literary works that have come out of this great city. He focuses on key British and American writers, including Byron, Ruskin, Pound and Eliot.
J.M.W. Turner and the Subject of History
Title | J.M.W. Turner and the Subject of History PDF eBook |
Author | Leo Costello |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 280 |
Release | 2017-07-05 |
Genre | Art |
ISBN | 1351561855 |
J.M.W. Turner and the Subject of History is an in-depth consideration of the artist's complex response to the challenge of creating history paintings in the early nineteenth century. Structured around the linked themes of making and unmaking, of creation and destruction, this book examines how Turner's history paintings reveal changing notions of individual and collective identity at a time when the British Empire was simultaneously developing and fragmenting. Turner similarly emerges as a conflicted subject, one whose artistic modernism emerged out of a desire to both continue and exceed his eighteenth-century aesthetic background by responding to the altered political and historical circumstances of the nineteenth century.
Shakespeare and Venice
Title | Shakespeare and Venice PDF eBook |
Author | Graham Holderness |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 287 |
Release | 2016-04-01 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1317056310 |
Shakespeare and Venice is the first book length study to describe and chronicle the mythology of Venice that was formulated in the Middle Ages and has persisted in fiction and film to the present day. Graham Holderness focuses specifically on how that mythology was employed by Shakespeare to explore themes of conversion, change, and metamorphosis. Identifying and outlining the materials having to do with Venice which might have been available to Shakespeare, Holderness provides a full historical account of past and present Venetian myths and of the city's relationship with both Judaism and Islam. Holderness also provides detailed readings of both The Merchant of Venice and of Othello against these mythical and historical dimensions, and concludes with discussion of Venice's relevance to both the modern world and to the past.
No Vulgar Hotel: The Desire and Pursuit of Venice
Title | No Vulgar Hotel: The Desire and Pursuit of Venice PDF eBook |
Author | Judith Martin |
Publisher | W. W. Norton & Company |
Pages | 331 |
Release | 2011-02-07 |
Genre | Travel |
ISBN | 0393078647 |
"Add No Vulgar Hotel to the list of books you must read before you come to Venice." —Donna Leon This is the definitive book for managing an incurable passion for a decaying, waterlogged village. Whether you already have a raging case of Venetophilia or are among the fifteen million people who yearly put themselves in danger of contracting it, here is where you get your fix of Venetian wit, history, practicality, and enchantment.