Venetian Views, Venetian Blinds : : English Fantasies of Venice.

• Superior document: Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft Series ; v.37
• Author: Pfister, Manfred.
• TeilnehmendeR: Schaff, Barbara.
• Place / Publishing House: Boston : : BRILL,, 1999.; ©1999.
• Year of Publication: 1999
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Language: English
• Series: Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft Series
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (263 pages)

Half a millennium of English and American fantasies of Venice: this collection of essays by leading critics in the field explores the continued and continuing fascination of travellers, writers, artists, theatre workers and film makers with the amphibious and ambiguous city in the lagoon. There is hardly another place in Europe that has become so much of a palimpsest, inscribed with the fantasies, the dreams and nightmares of generations of foreigners, and this turns Venetian Views, Venetian Blinds into a particularly pertinent case study of the ways cultural difference within Europe is experienced, enacted and constructed. The essays range across five centuries - from the Renaissance to our postmodern present, from Shakespeare and his contemporary Coryate to recent novels, detective fiction and films - and, in contrast to previous studies focussing on the Grand Tour, they emphasise more recent developments and how they continue or disrupt traditional ways of perceiving - or being blind to! - Venice.

Table of Contents

Intro -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- Introduction -- The Passion from Winterson to Coryate -- Writing Venice: Paradoxical Signification as Connotational Feature -- "Which is the Merchant here? And which the Jew?": The Venice of Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice -- Elective Affinities: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in Venice -- William Beckford in Venice, Liminal City: The Pavilion and the Interminable Staircase -- Venetian Views and Voices in Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho and Braddon's The Venetians -- Sunset City - City of the Dead: Venice and the 19th Century Apocalyptic Imagination -- Literary Deaths in Venice -- Venice - Site of Mutability, Transgression and Imagination -- The Venetian Hours of Henry James -- An Amazon in Venice: Vernon Lee's "Lady Tal" -- Theatre as Festive Play: Max Reinhardt's Production of The Merchant of Venice in Venice -- Tourists Lost in Venice: Daphne du Maurier's Don't Look Now and Ian McEwan's The Comfort of Strangers -- 'Dream Factories': Hollywood and Venice in Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now -- Confidential Venice -- Intertextual Venice: Blood and Crime and Death Renewed in Two Contemporary Novels -- Robert Coover's Pinocchio in Venice: An Anatomy of a Talking Book -- INTERNATIONALE FORSCHUNGEN ZUR ALLGEMEINEN UND VERGLEICHENDEN LITERATURWISSENSCHAFT.