Despite the growing critical relevance of Shakespeare's two Venetian plays and a burgeoning bibliography on both The Merchant of Venice and Othello, few books have dealt extensively with the relationship between Shakespeare and Venice. Setting out to offer new perspectives to a traditional topic, this timely collection fills a gap in the literature, addressing the new historical, political and economic questions that have been raised in the last few years. The essays in this volume consider Venice a real as well as symbolic landscape that needs to be explored in its multiple resonances, both in Shakespeare's historical context and in the later tradition of reconfiguring one of the most represented cities in Western culture. Shylock and Othello are there to remind us of the dark sides of the myth of Venice, and of the inescapable fact that the issues raised in the Venetian plays are tremendously topical; we are still haunted by these theatrical casualties of early modern multiculturalism.

Despite the growing critical relevance of Shakespeare's two Venetian plays and a burgeoning bibliography on both The Merchant of Venice and Othello, few books have dealt extensively with the relationship between Shakespeare and Venice. This timely collection fills a gap in the literature, addressing the new historical, political and economic questions that have been raised in the last few years about early modern globalization, multiculturalism, and multiple social and ethnic identities.

This book explores the day-to-day 'lived experience' of fascism in Venice during the 1930s, charting the attempts of the fascist regime to infiltrate and reshape Venetians' everyday lives and their responses to the intrusions of the fascist state.

Focusing on opera and modernism in postwar Venice, Boyd-Bennett challenges assumptions about music in the twentieth century.

Influenced by Hegel and Nietzsche, and inspired by stays in Italy and France, as well as travels to Russia, Spain, and North Africa, Rainer Maria Rilke nevertheless sought desperately to be original. He rejected all «idées reçues, » whether they were of God, reality, or literature, instead creating his own absolute. He searched for the «real, » re-formed German poetry, and revolutionized Western narrative prose with Malte Laurids Brigge. While Rilke's work is marked by two cesuras, after which it displays important advances in diction and the figuration of verbal icons, it becomes ever more esoteric. However, there are also constants throughout his oeuvre in thematics, topoi, and diction - for example, the preoccupation with death, figures such as the angel, key nouns, alliterations, and noun sequences. His fear of death drove him to adopt «the open, » an idea conceived by the dubious mystagogue Alfred Schuler that surfaces throughout Rilke's poetry and triumphs in Sonnets to Orpheus and Duino Elegies.