In Nick BantockÆs The Venetian Wife, we are treated to a sensual journey about the power of love. Sara Wolfe conserves art for a San Francisco museum. She is contacted via email by N. Conti, who wishes her to travel the world to find four ancient pieces of Indian art to complete his collection. She does so and eventually finds the love of her life, Marco; while she ultimately learns that N. Conti is a spirit who needs the artwork to become reunited with his wife Yasod in the afterlife. Throughout the novel, there are various elements that characterize The Venetian Wife as a product of the literary genre of romanticism.
There are numerous elements in The Venetian Wife that make the work a romance. Romanticism involved the ôrise of individualism, as seen by the cult of the artistic genius,ö (Romanticism, p. 2). We see that Sara is fascinated by the Indian god Shiva that hangs on the museum wall where she works. We see that N. Conti is fascinated by Indian works of art from the past. In their fascination with art of the past and their sentimentalism over such artworks, both N. Conti and Sara are focused on the creations of the individual with both mythic and legendary significance. These are all characteristics of romanticism which strongly values the past; ôOld forms were valued, ruins were sentimentalized as iconic of the action of Nature on the works of man, and mythic and legendary material which would previously have been see as low culture became a common basis for works of high art and literature,ö (Romanticism, p. 2).
We see in the novel that N. Conti appears to have the ability to read SaraÆs mind, even though the whole of their communication consists of email exchanges, journal entries, and letters. In this manner, the novel is also a romance in that romanticism viewed the ôindividual imagination as a critical authorityö that ôstressed strong emotion,ö (Romanticism,
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