Venice Desired (Cobee) (Convergences: Inventories of the Present): 7 - Hardcover

Tanner, T

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674933125 ISBN 13: 9780674933125

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1993

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. 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

Review:

This is not so much a work of academic scholarship (though the scholars would do well to mine it for insights) as an extremely personal testimony to the author's own 'site of writing.' The recognitions are brilliant; the prose is powerful and sustained; the readings are nuanced and subtle.--Richard Macksey, Johns Hopkins University

I always read Tanner with admiration for the activity and enthusiasm of his mind, and this book shows those qualities to such a degree...that I have no hesitation in calling it his finest book so far... Tanner is one of the diminishing number of critics who continue to delight in literature and whose principal effort is to induce delight in the reader. This is a work of rare excellence.--Sir Frank Kermode

About the Author:

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

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0674933125
• ISBN 13: 9780674933125
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 384