Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Storied Cities: Literary Imaginings of Florence, Venice, and Rome by Michael L. Ross

1996; University of Western Ontario Libraries; Volume: 22; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/esc.1996.0034

1913-4835

William Blissett,

Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis

Perhaps there is an inevitable fiction-making in any narrative, and Image­ less Truths does not always quite escape some fiction-making of its own. In the comment, “Shelley’s decision in 1816 to write hymns, after years of pre­ occupation with the narrative forms employed for such poems as Queen Mab and Alastor” (51), the term “years of preoccupation” seems more appropri­ ate for a writer whose work develops over a longer period than the mere four years it marks. This is not to suggest that Weisman is naive about her own use of narrative. She suggests Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending as relevant to her approach (179n). Kermode’s distinction between myth and self-consciousness about fiction might be used to expose the mythic fictions of a fully developed career that critics employ to narrativize Shelley’s life, which ended abruptly and accidentally at the age of thirty. The closing lines of Imageless Truths seem to recognize this fiction in the tentative repetition of “perhaps.” Yet even Weisman’s comment that if “ ‘what is life’ can never be answered satisfactorily, this may well be enough” (178) still hints at a gesture of closure. But as its title suggests, Weisman is well aware that Imageless Truths are just that. In so clearly illuminating the problematic of poetic fictions, this study represents a valuable addition to Romantic studies and to Shelley criticism. lisa v a r g o / University of Saskatchewan Michael L. Ross, Storied Cities: Literary Imaginings of Florence, Venice, and Rome (Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1994). xiv, 310. $55.00 US cloth. “Manifestly incomplete.” The opening sentence of the preface emphasizes those words: “The view presented here of the literature that has grown up around the three great storied cities of Florence, Venice, and Rome is man­ ifestly incomplete” (xiii). This takes the wind out of the reviewer— this reviewer, all set as a Veneziano to demand where Anthony Powell’s Tempo­ rary Kings and Baron Corvo’s Desire and Pursuit of the Whole and. Muriel Sparks’s Territorial Rights have disappeared. Where is Max Beerbohm, whose “Stranger in Venice” was praised so extravagantly by Evelyn Waugh? Where is Milton Wilson, to whom I would give matching praise for his “Trav­ ellers’ Venice: Some Images for Byron and Shelley” ( UTQ 43, 1974)? The Merchant of Venice and Othello are briefly mentioned, Volpone not. No touching all bases here, no yard-by-yard scrimmage. The bibliography, which is quite substantial, is strictly limited to what bears on the particular vision of the three cities here conveyed: it has none of the padding that goes with the mechanics of “retrieval.” No one else approaching the same 368 general subject would make the same choices or deal with them similarly or in the same order. This is a deliberate exercise in synecdoche, taking the part for the whole, the selection for the collection. And what a rich and varied selection it is, combining the main literary sites and some intriguing byways. The book is long enough, and full enough, and, most important, coherent enough, to encourage the reader to consolidate what he has learned and to reach out for more, even to compile his own complementary book. It is rhapsodic rather than systematic. I intend that as praise. Think of the essentially rhapsodic Spanish pieces of Emmanuel Chabrier, Claude Debussy, Manuel de Falla, and consider how much they add not only to our pleasure but to our understanding of Spain. A city, in contrast to a town, is too complex to be grasped by the mind, but it is not (quite) beyond the size of dreaming, not beyond imagining, though no two imaginings of it will be the same. What Professor Ross does for each of his three cities is to collect, from a vast chrestomathy of liter­ ary treasures, half a dozen particularly rich or significant examples that, in themselves and in relation to one another, define the city limits and the city centre. For Venice, these include by way of general context in an introduc­ tory chapter, Byron and Proust, Dickens and Wilkie Collins, Goethe and Thomas Mann, Howells and Henry James, Mary McCarthy and Jan...