Writing the City: Venice

Cities play a more important role in literature and art than merely providing background for them.

Indeed, the relationship is best understood the other way around; It is through their depiction in literature and art that cities taken on their symbolic and iconographic significance.

In Writing the city or painting the city we creat enduring myths and images that become the city itself. In this book, the first of an ambitious series, Tony Tanner explores the phenomenon, showing how it is as much Venice the cluster of associations, allusions and symbols created by writers and artists that features in later writings set against Venetian background.

It is Venice brought to life by Ruskin, that drew James, Mann, Proust and Holderlin, to name but a few, to the 'Venice' of our shared cultural imagination.

Tanner's book is a brilliant depiction of the overlaid myths and images of Venice that have so enriched Europe's culture over the past two centuries. Students and teachers of English and comparative literature, and general readers.