SOURCE: Berman, Russell A. “History and Community in Death in Venice.” In Death in Venice: Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical and Historical Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Five Contemporary Critical Perspectives, edited by Naomi Ritter, pp. 263-80. Boston: Bedford Books, 1998.

In the following essay, Berman provides a contemporary historicist interpretation of Death in Venice.

During recent decades literary critics have increasingly chosen to approach texts by scrutinizing their historical standing. This “new” history represents a significant break with the formalist methods associated with the once “New” Criticism, which flourished during the middle of the century and directed attention to the internal structures of literature rather than to contextual matters. Critics treated such contexts, somewhat derisively, as merely “extrinsic” to the work of art. The recent historicist turn has also, however, proliferated in competition with the neoformalism of deconstructive criticism, which, when strictly pursued, addresses only the linguistic...