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