Storied Cities: Literary Imaginings of Florence, Venice, and Rome

by Michael L. Ross

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.

328 pages, Hardcover

First published December 30, 1993

About the author

Michael Ross received his Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University in 1996. From 1996 to 2001 he was an Assistant Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He also spent the 2000 calendar year as a Visiting Scholar at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., and Jakarta, Indonesia. He is now Professor of Political Science, and Director of the UCLA Center for Southeast Asian Studies.

His research deals with political economy, democratization, natural resources, and poverty in the developing world - particularly (but not exclusively) in Southeast Asia. His main project is a book on the "resource curse" that explains why countries with lots of natural resource wealth tend to do worse than countries with with resource wealth.

His 2008 article, "Oil, Islam, and Women," received the Heinz Eulau Award from the American Political Science Association, for the best article published in the American Political Science Review.

Chair of UCLA International Development Studies Interdepartmental Program 2004-2008. Director, UCLA Center for Southeast Asian Studies, 2007-present.