Research Group in Romantic Dialogues and Legacies
“This Strange Dream upon the Water”: Venice and the Cultural Imagination since 1800Romantic Dialogues and Legacies is a Research Group, with Professor Michael O’Neill as Director and Dr Mark Sandy and Dr Sarah Wootton as Co-Directors, in the Department of English Studies at Durham University. Following the success of previous public lecture series, ‘Romanticism and Its Legacies’ in 2006 and ‘Modelling the Self: Subjectivity and Identity in Romantic and Post-Romantic Thought and Culture’ in 2007-8, the Research Group has organised a further public lecture series, ‘“This Strange Dream upon the Water”: Venice and the Cultural Imagination since 1800’, which is supported by the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham University whose annual theme for 2009-10 is ‘Water’.
As Charles Dickens’s description reminds us, Venice has always allured the cultural imagination. Rising out of the sea, to which its symbolic marriage was signalled by the Doge’s annual casting of a ring into the lagoon, it is like no other human settlement in its physical make-up. Even now funeral corteges and furniture removals travel down canals rather than roads; as visitors step in and out of vaporetti, they seem to be moving in and out of pictorial spaces. The city brings dwelling, history, aesthetics, and commerce into intimate connection with water.
This lecture series focuses on the city’s representation in painting, music and literature since 1800. The period is one in which Venice’s trading heyday had long since vanished; a byword for lost liberty under Austrian rule, it becomes the subject of elegiac broodings on fallen greatness, but also a place in which masqued revelry, carnival, licence, and dissolutions of normal perspectives still abide as possibilities. In the period, Venice becomes a playground for the imagination, but one in which the playful and the serious, aesthetics and history, entwine.
The public lectures in this series, given by experts in various related fields from inside and beyond Durham, explore how Venice featured in the Romantic poetry of Wordsworth, Shelley and Byron (in whose case comparative connections will be made with Shakespeare); in operas by Verdi, Ponchielli, and Offenbach; and in paintings by Turner. They also analyse how Venice captured the Post-Romantic imagination of Ruskin, Robert Browning, Dickens, Henry James, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Thomas Mann, emerging as a place of metamorphosis and memory, and a site of mirages and value in a troubled, uncertain world. These lectures draw on a range of disciplines and approaches as they ask what the city’s imaginative appeal tells us about the function of the imagination in Western culture since 1800, and about the real and symbolic function of water, the water in which Shelley and Turner saw the alchemising reflections of a Venetian sunset.
These public lectures are free and open to all. Lectures will be held at Durham University, Elvet Riverside 2, New Elvet, Room 201 at 6.15pm. Please see below for details of dates and speakers. For more information please contact the co-organisers, Professor Michael O’Neill (m.s.o’neill@durham.ac.uk), Dr Mark Sandy (m.r.sandy@durham.ac.uk), or Dr Sarah Wootton (s.e.wootton@durham.ac.uk).
19 October 2009: Mr Bernard Beatty (Liverpool University): 'A More
Beloved Existence': From Shakespeare’s ‘Venice’ to Byron’s Venice
2 November 2009: Dr Mark Sandy (Durham University): 'By the Lone Sea':
Venice and Visions of Decay in Wordsworth, the Shelleys, and Thomas
Mann
16 November 2009: Mr Andrew Wilton (Tate Gallery): 'Gliding up her streets as in a dream': Turner and the Floating City
7 December 2009: Professor Jeremy Dibble (Durham University): Venice and Opera
25 January 2010: Professor Michael O'Neill (Durham University): 'What's
Become of All the Gold...?': Venice, Browning, Dickens, and Victorian
Cultural Imaginings
8 February 2010: Professor Dinah Birch (Liverpool University): The Lamp of Memory: Ruskin and Venice
1 March 2010: Dr Sarah Wootton (Durham University): 'As a figure in a picture stepping by magic out of its frame': Henry James's Venice, the
Visual Arts, and Film Adaptation
8 March 2010: Dr Jason Harding (Durham University): 'Who clipped the lion's wings/ And flea'd his rump and pared his claws?': The myth of Venice in the decline of Eliot and Pound