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This volume studies the status and reception of the professional, semi-professional and amateur singer in England from the earliest time for which records are available, the later Middle Ages, up to the present. It also offers a principled examination of their songs and why particular songs were taken into singers' repertoires while others remained printed street ballads without ever becoming part of the oral tradition. The structure is broadly chronological, although the nature of evidence from oral and ephemeral sources makes this impossible to adhere to strictly.
“Mr. Pepys and The Turk” is SPECHEL’s first inroad into publication. In line with the mission embodied in its name, this book and subsequent publications will be available in ebook and print-on-demand form, making it considerably more accessible than if it were solely a physical object. “Mr Pepys and Turk” tells of English popular notions of the “Turk” through history, centring upon the diary entries of civil servant Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) and the street ballads which he loved to collect. The author’s fascination with this subject stems from his dual life as an academic/folk singer, but also from having lived and worked most of his adult life in Hungary’s only city with t...
Charles Dickens 200: Text and Beyond: a commemorative volume is the second volume in the new SPECHEL e-ditions series. It commemorates the two-hundredth anniversary of Dickens’s birth, and for the purpose brings together, in addition to ‘dyed-in-the-wool’ Dickensians, a curious variety of experts from a miscellany of areas of expertise ranging from folksinger to linguist and even magician. The chapters approach Charles Dickens from musical aspects ranging from opera to music-hall song and street ballad, from his role as a family conjuror, to psychological analyses of various of his characters and linguistic analysis of his style. He is regarded through the prism of the Irish literary scene but also through the eye of the Hungarian translator of his work, through operatic and photographic adaptations of his subject-matter. Every new chapter produces an exciting and unexpected new facet of the author, whose birth the volume celebrates.
Ethnic Mobility in Ballads is the fourth volume in the new SPECHEL e-ditions series. It comprises studies about ballads that in different ways reflect the movement of ethnic groups, transcending and defying national borders in ways that range from the borrowing of ‘national’ heroes to popular interpretations (and distortions) of ethnicities not one’s own, to the transfer of humour from one ethnicity to another. The studies are the result of the 44th International Ballad Conference of the Kommission für Volksdichtung, held in 2014 in Pécs, a city in Southern Hungary (Cultural Capital of Europe, 2010) which was occupied by the Ottoman Turks after the defeat of the Hungarians at Mohács in 1526 and inhabited by them for over a century, so it is hardly surprising that several of the papers make up a distinct group about balladic Turks of one degree of reality or another, but a study about the Slovenian appropriation of a Hungarian ‘hero’ is also indicative of the spread of the papers.
The volume Across Borders and Time: Jonathan Swift contains the papers delivered at the conference The World of Swift; Swift and his World, which was dedicated to the 350th anniversary of the birth of Jonathan Swift. The conference was held on 24-25 November 2017, at the House of Arts and Literature, Pécs, and jointly organised by the Institute of English Studies of Pécs University and SPECHEL, the latter of which is also the publisher of this volume in its series, SPECHEL e-ditions. It also benefited from the support provided by the Irish Embassy in Budapest. That year also marked the 650th anniversary of Hungary’s first university, founded in Pécs in 1367, and so the conference honour...
Brief biographies of governors and other representative citizens in Morgan and Scott Counties, Illinois.
The essays in the present volume are dedicated and written in tribute to Professor Mária Kurdi upon celebrating her 70th birthday. As a multifaceted scholar, Mária is known for her enduring contribution to the wide field of literary studies, her main research areas being modern American and British drama, drama theory, and comparative literary studies. An internationally renowned scholar of modern Irish literature and culture, she is also well known for the many ways in which she has promoted Irish studies in Hungary. This is the third volume in the SPECHEL e-ditions series.
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