Venice Desired

Venice has long been a site and topic for the European literary imagination and has inspired Byron, Ruskin, James, von Hoffmannsthal, Proust and Pound. This work examines these writers and the city which informed their lives and their writing.

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Watery, dark, silent, Venice has long been a site and topic for the European imagination. Venice - the place, the names, the dream - has been the scene and inspiration of many writers, particularly Byron, Ruskin, James, von Hoffmannsthal, Proust and Pound. They are the focus of Tony Tanner's exploration of Venice in literature and the starting point for further discussions of Browning and Melville, Rilke, Mann and Sartre. Defeated by Napoleon in 1797, Venice dropped out of history, languishing through two centuries as a curiously marooned spectacle. The beautiful city par excellence, the greatest and richest and most splendid republic, now declined and fallen, it lent itself to appreciation and recuperation in writing. And as mediated by Ruskin, it was to play a crucial role in the development of modern writing.