Venice Desired (Convergences: Inventories of the Present) - Hardcover

Tanner, Tony

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674933125 ISBN 13: 9780674933125

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1992

Synopsis

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. Tony 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.

About this title

About the Author:

Tony Tanner was Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Cambridge.

From Library Journal:

The city of Venice has fascinated authors and artists since at least the Renaissance. This new book by British scholar Tanner ( Jane Austen , LJ 10/15/86; Adultery and the Novel , LJ 1/15/80) offers a witty, erudite, and often exuberant examination of Venice in the 19th- and early 20th-century literary imagination. Centering on Lord Byron, John Ruskin, Henry James, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Marcel Proust, and Ezra Pound, and clarifying their influence on one another, Tanner traces the perception of Venice as an ambiguous object of desire, both aesthetic and erotic, both tempting and dangerous. He also glances at Rilke, Mann, and Sartre. An important contribution that is informative, insightful, and entertaining.
- T.L. Cooksey, Armstrong State Coll., Savannah, Ga.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0674933125
• ISBN 13: 9780674933125
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384