SOURCE: Seaboyer, Judith. “Second Death in Venice: Romanticism and the Compulsion to Repeat in Jeanette Winterson's The Passion.” Contemporary Literature 38, no. 3 (fall 1997): 483–509.

In the following essay, Seaboyer examines the variety of linguistic and intertextual repetitions that structure The Passion, arguing that the novel's setting during the Napoleonic Wars and its thematic focus on death and mutilation exemplify the relationship between the psychoanalytic death drive and the rise of modern European nationalism.

It is a given that Venice was a central topos for the nineteenth-century Anglo-American imagination, fascinating not only because of the Romantic attraction to “beauty in decay” and the frisson accompanying the possibility that all that faded loveliness might yet slip back beneath the waters from which it had so improbably arisen, but also because of the ambiguity and paradox that inform its geographical as well as its cultural heritage. After a hiatus that has lasted since...