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The fabled cities of Italy--Florence, Venice, and Rome--have each acquired a distinctive tradition of literary representation involving characteristic, recurrent motifs and symbolic signatures. A wealth of writing on each is examined in fiction and poetry of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries mainly by British and American authors. Included are works by Robert Browning on Florence and Rome; George Eliot, W.D. Howells, E.M. Forster, and D.H. Lawrence on Florence; Charles Dickens, Thomas Mann, L.P. Hartley, and Anthony Hecht on Venice; Arthur Hugh Clough, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edith Wharton, and Aldous Huxley on Rome; and Henry James and Bernard Malamud on Florence, Venice, and Rome.
The analysis points to Florence frequently being depicted in terms of binary oppositions, including Hebraism versus Hellenism, past versus present, stasis versus movement, and light versus darkness. Venetian narratives are commonly infused with motifs relating to dream and unreality, obsession, voyeurism, isolation, melancholia, and death. History is a controlling metaphor for Roman fiction and poetry, combined with the motif of change and, especially, fall from innocence to experience. Ross shows how writers have self-consciously built on the literary conventions set earlier and anticipates that these cities will remain natural loci for continued post-modernist experiment. In a wider theoretical framework, he examines this writing identified with place for the light it sheds on the issue of the importance of setting in literature.
List of contents
Introduction: A Tale of Three Cities
FlorenceThe Etrurian Athens
Robert Browning's Dialectical City
A Blind Worship of Clashing Deities: Romola Agonistes
Madonnas of the Past and Future: Howells and James
A Room with a View: A Sense of Deities Reconciled
The Extreme South of the Lily's Flowering: Aaron's Rod
A Great Tradition Travestied: Fidelman in Florence
VeniceThis Most Improbable of Cities
"The Fair Frailty": Prison and Abyss
Henry James's Venetian Curiosity-Shop
L.P. Hartley's Islands of Identity
Glass Menageries: The Venice of Hecht and Malamud
RomeCity of the Soul
Juxtaposition: Browning and Clough
Pearls and Carbuncles: The Marble Faun
A Large Capacity for Ruin: Roderick Hudson and The Portrait of a Lady
Brief Roman Candles: Wharton, Huxley and Malamud
Story's End
Works Cited
About the author
MICHAEL L. ROSS is Associate Professor of English at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. His academic specialty is nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature, and Robert Browning, D.H. Lawrence, and George Orwell appear frequently as subjects of his published literary criticism.
