SOURCE: Seaboyer, Judith. “Robert Coover's Pinocchio in Venice: An Anatomy of a Talking Book.” In Venetian Views, Venetian Blinds: English Fantasies of Venice, edited by Manfred Pfister and Barbara Schaff, pp. 237–55. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999.

In the following essay, Seaboyer locates Pinocchio in Venice within a tradition of literary works about Venice and examines the novel's intertextual references and philosophical discourse, including allusions to Dante Alighieri, James Joyce, and Carlo Collodi, as they relate to the theme of metamorphosis, Menippean satire, and the Bakhtinian concept of carnival.

Given the evidence in this volume for the long-standing fascination of Venice for the anglophone imagination, perhaps it should come as no surprise that Robert Coover's Pinocchio in Venice (1991) is one of a flood of Venice novels written in English and published in the 1990s. Even before the English Renaissance, when Thomas Nashe invented a visit for The Unfortunate Traveller and Shakespeare staged...