Venice and the Cultural Imagination

Michael O’Neill is Professor of English at Durham University, UK. His books include The Human Mind’s Imaginings: Conflict and Achievement in Shelley’s Poetry (1989) and, as co-editor, The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley (2013), as well as three volumes of poetry, the last of which was Gangs of Shadow (2014). Mark Sandy is Reader in English Studies at Durham University, UK. He is author of Romanticism, Memory, and Mourning (2013) and Poetics of Self and Form in Keats and Shelley: Nietzschean Subjectivity and Genre (2005). Sarah Wootton is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at Durham University, UK. She has published widely on nineteenth-century literature and the visual arts, and is the author of Consuming Keats: Nineteenth-Century Representations in Art and Literature (2006) and Byronic Heroes in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing and Screen Adaptation (2016).

• 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

'The volume is handsomely made, generously illustrated, and well indexed ... there are astonishingly more subtle interconnections and interactions at work than initially imagined by the reader - and this is one of the book's greatest rewards and challenges ... a most vital addition towards the scholarly effort to establish the crucial role "Venice" played and continues to play in our understanding of art, nature, culture, and history.' European Romantic Review 'Brilliantly chosen, skilfully interwoven and consistently illuminating, this collection of essays does justice to its subject and represents a new high-water mark in interdisciplinary literary criticism. It is an essential companion-volume to Tony Tanner's "Venice Desired", sending its readers back to books, pictures music, and to the city itself.' BARS Bulletin 'O'Neill reads Browning with a poet's sensibility, a characteristic that is sometimes lacking in Browning criticism.' Victorian Poetry 'This collection of essays bring together detailed studies of different responses to the city ... captures something of the magic of Venice.' Victorian Studies 'explores the stylistic endeavours of Browning and Dickens in rendering their visions of Venice... illuminates connections between Dickens and Browning and brings to light the Venetian echoes in these poems.' The Year's Work in English Studies 'As the lecture series it is based on must have been, this book is itself very enjoyable. The essays have numerous insights to offer about both their immediate topics and those "themes central to Anglo-American and European culture" mentioned in the introduction, such as "the question of artistic and cultural legacies; the relative status of the ethical and the aesthetic; the relationship between home and abroad ... dream and reality, art and money, history and myth".' Byron Journal'this enjoyable and informative volume undoubtedly achieves its aim of adding to our understanding of the history of European representations of Venice and of the key place occupied by the city in the European imagination-and it is all the more delightful for being interspersed with a generous range of images, and quotations from some of the greatest literary responses to the place Dickens famously dubbed a "strange Dream upon the water."' Notes and Queries