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2 - Reimagining Venice and Visions of Decay in Wordsworth, the Shelleys and Thomas Mann

Mark Sandy
Affiliation:
Durham University
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Summary

Frequently represented in our cultural imagination as the regal ruler of the Adriatic, Venice's enticingly precarious architectural and cultural triumphs arise effortlessly from the natural powerful motion of the ocean's waves, which both sustain and constantly threaten to engulf the city's many splendours. Her existence traverses those normative boundaries between land and sea, between culture and nature, between civilized order and chaotic natural forces, between Apollonian reason and Dionysian passion, between the city's resplendent myth and her darker treacherous reality. Mirroring the topography of dark streets and bright squares, Venice is already a city of sublime and cultural enlightenment as much as it is a place of clandestine plots, betrayals and intrigues in the imaginations of her many expectant tourists. Romantic and post-Romantic responses to the city share in and invert past and present visitors’ wonder at winding through crisscrossing, narrow and darkened vennels to emerge, suddenly, into a sunlit piazza; or the magnificence of the Basilica of San Marco; or an unexpected vista of the shimmering Grand Canal. Attuned to the turbulent political and historical fortunes of the subjugated Venetian Republic, those Romantic and post-Romantic imaginings and reimaginings of Venice found that the city's own self-perpetuated, incandescent, eternal myth cast its own shadowy anti-myth of ruin and decay.

Type
Chapter
Information
Venice and the Cultural Imagination
'This Strange Dream upon the Water'
, pp. 27 - 42
Publisher: Pickering & Chatto
First published in: 2014

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