Mannan, Ilona Katherine Lal Amol;
(2025)
Henry James and the Art of Venice.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
Abstract
This thesis explores Henry James’s relationship with Venice and its art from before his first trip in 1869 and beyond his last visit in 1907, years during which James repeatedly visited and wrote about the city, probing its meanings and those of its artistic tradition. His Venetian texts engage with American ideas about the city and play their part in contemporary debates that used Venice to question the identity of the United States. Making Venice a lens through which to examine America’s identity as a republic, James explored how it could serve as a model; famed for mercantile and artistic success, it was also a warning of what the American future might hold. Each chapter focuses on one of his periods in Venice and the associated work he produced — a chronological approach aimed at countering totalising interpretations of James’s shifting relationship with it, to trace instead the evolution of his thought and his writing on the city. James’s perceptions of Venice were never static; he continually revises his impressions, using the metropolis to probe and extend his authorial identity. Venice became for him an ambivalent symbol of artistic endeavour— the city most richly emblematic of the challenges he faced as a writer and, with its sublime aesthetic heritage and continuing pictorial possibilities, representative of what he might achieve. James’s time in the city also connected him with American artists working in Venice; their portrayals of the metropolis are suggestive about his work. Drawing on archival research, printed sources and visual art, the thesis traces how through a succession of phases Venice remained central to James’s sense of himself as a writer: constituting an incomparable artistic example, as his lifelong attachment to Tintoretto, Titian and Veronese shows, and figuring as an ambiguous symbol of civilization in its triumphs and its corruptions.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Henry James and the Art of Venice |
| Language: | English |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Dept of English Lang and Literature |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10210427 |
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