Tropic of Venice by Margaret Doody (review)

REVIEWS 260 chapter, that “learning by example must come at the example’s expense” (208). Focusing on the final two books of the revised Faerie Queene, “poetic justice” is treated as both a narrative trope and as a potential didactic tool, one experienced by the reader both within and without the text. Returning to contemporary intellectual debates on the subject of punishment, Dolven again launches into an analysis of Spenser’s text that is at once thoroughly historicized and deeply analytical. Ultimately, punishment, too, fails as a model for teaching learning, and instead, at best, comes to signal a longing that is nostalgic and innovative. On the whole, Dolven’s text offers a long-overdue reexamination of Renaissance romance that gives serious intellectual and political teeth to a genre often considered a trifle in relation to its contemporary competitors. Though he ultimately paints the efforts of these authors as frustrated, at best, Dolven’s exhaustive research of the pedagogical practices of the sixteenth century and his knowledgeable treatment of the difficult and tangled narratives of Renaissance romances expands the critical landscape on which the romance of the period might be examined. That said, the text does face the challenge inherent to any analysis of the romance, i.e. without at least a passing familiarity with the thousands of pages of narrative written by the authors collectively examined by Dolven’s work, some of Dolven’s arguments—particularly in the chapter on the new Arcadia—will be difficult to understand, let alone appreciate. Moreover , though he does with painstaking detail attempt to delineate categories of knowing in his first chapter, those distinctions blur, at times, as the work moves from the classroom to the text. Nonetheless, Jeff Dolven’s work masterfully navigates the struggle Renaissance authors faced when attempting to craft a poetics of pedagogy. Though it is ultimately a wrought and self-defeating exercise, the book’s coda and its treatment of Milton gestures toward the way in which the seventeenth, and later eighteenth, century took up this problem, finding a solution, however imperfect, in the bildungsroman. Both in its scope, and in its relevance to the study of Renaissance romance, Scenes of Instruction is an impressive piece of scholarship that offers both a thorough historical account of its subject and a critical scheme that, appropriately, teaches learning in object and in method. IAN HOCH, English, UCLA Margaret Doody, Tropic of Venice (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2007) 345 pp., 12 color + 25 b&w ill. Tropic of Venice is much more than a history of Venice, although the city’s history figures prominently in the book. It is an exploration of the concept of Venice as told through the author’s personal encounters with the city, as well through the impressions of visitors throughout the centuries. Organized thematically rather than chronologically, Doody’s book investigates the many tropes of Venice, which range in character from the bestial to the exotic. These include decay (both moral and structural), the Orient, reflective surfaces, water, the feminine, impurity, labyrinth, and color. Through these many concepts she addresses nearly every aspect of Venice including its art, architecture, government , dialect, ecology, engineering, and cuisine, almost all of which are distinctly unique in this archipelagic city. REVIEWS 261 The book begins with her first impressions of the city, which precede a detailed account of her first trip to Venice as an enthusiastic but ingenuous college student studying abroad in the 1960s. The next chapter shifts gears as Doody addresses Venice’s history. She begins not with its founding, but with Napoleon’s conquest in 1797. The author spends much of the next chapter discussing Venice in the nineteenth century because as she points out, “Consciously or not, modern visitors still see Venice through nineteenth-century lenses and suppositions.” This period includes the oppressive French and Austrian occupations, the latter of which did not end until 1866, at which point Venice joined the nascent Italian monarchy. Doody does not simply give the reader a history, rather, this is just the backdrop for discussing ideas such as the fate of Venice or experiences such as entering the city. Doody continues into an in depth discussion of virtually everything that...