Venice and the Cultural Imagination:

'This Strange Dream upon the Water'

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Editors: Michael O'Neill, Mark Sandy and Sarah Wootton

In the era of the Grand Tour, Venice was the cultural jewel in the crown of Europe and the epitome of decadence. Though visited by only the lucky few, its seductive charms were shared with those back home through the art and literature it inspired.

This edited collection draws on a range of disciplines and approaches to explore how Venice has been represented in Western culture since 1800. Essays from experts in their field consider the city’s depiction in poetry, fiction, art, music and film. Beyond simply affirming the allure of Venice, this book functions as a case study with broader implications for the understanding of artistic and cultural legacies, and the relationships between art and money, history and myth.

Sample pages

• Introduction
• Index

Readership

Art History, Cultural History, Travel Writing, Literature, Music and Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Studies

Contents

Introduction
1 A ‘More Beloved Existence’: From Shakespeare’s ‘Venice’ to Byron’s Venice – Bernard Beatty
2 Reimagining Venice and Visions of Decay in Wordsworth, the Shelleys and Thomas Mann – Mark Sandy
3 J M W Turner and the 'Floating City' – Andrew Wilton
4 Venice and Opera: Tradition, Propaganda and Transformation – Jeremy Dibble
5 Venice, Dickens, Robert Browning and the Victorian Imagination – Michael O’Neill
6 'The Lamp of Memory': Ruskin and Venice – Dinah Birch
7 Edith Wharton’s ‘Venetian Backgrounds’ – Pamela Knights
8 Henry James’s Venice and the Visual Arts – Sarah Wootton
9 The Myth of Venice in the Decline of Eliot and Pound – Jason Harding
10 Representations of Venice in Daphne du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now and Nicolas Roeg’s Screen Adaptation – Rebecca White

Related titles

• Americans on Fiction, 1776–1900
• A Cultural History of the Radical Sixties in the San Francisco Bay Area
• Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country: A Reassessment
• Lives of the Great Romantics
• Lives of Victorian Literary Figures
• London Opera Observed, 1711–1844
• New Woman Fiction, 1881–1899
• The Journals and Diaries of E M Forster
• The Unpublished Writings of Edith Wharton
• Women’s Travel Writings in Italy
• Writing the Self: Henry James and America

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