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This study is a groundbreaking investigation into the formative influence of music on Virginia Woolf's writing. In this unique study Emma Sutton discusses all of Woolf's novels as well as selected essays and short fiction, offering detailed commentaries on Woolf's numerous allusions to classical repertoire and to composers including Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner. Sutton explores Woolf's interest in the contested relationship between politics and music, placing her work in a matrix of ideas about music and national identity, class, anti-Semitism, pacifism, sexuality and gender. The study also considers the formal influence of music - from fugue to Romantic opera - on Woolf's prose and narrative techniques. The analysis of music's role in Woolf's aesthetics and fiction is contextualized in accounts of her musical education, activities as a listener, and friendships with musicians; and the study outlines the relationship between her 'musicalized' work and that of contemporaries including Joyce, Lawr
Analyses the narrative function of Khārijism in 9th- and 10th-century Islamic historiography
Edinburgh University Press will publish two self-contained guides to reading al-Jahiz that also shed light on his society and its writings. This first volume, 'In Praise of Books', is devoted to bibliomania and al-Jahiz's bibliophilia. Volume 2, In Censure of Books, explores Al-Jahiz's bibliophobia. Al-Jahiz was a bibliomaniac, theologian, and spokesman for the political and cultural elite, a writer who lived, counselled and wrote in Iraq during the first century of the 'Abbasid caliphate. He advised, argued and rubbed shoulders with the major power brokers and leading religious and intellectual figures of his day, and crossed swords in debate and argument with the architects of the Islamic religious, theological, philosophical and cultural canon. His many, tumultuous writings engage with these figures, their ideas, theories and policies. They give us an invaluable but much-neglected window onto the values and beliefs of this cosmopolitan elite.
This study compares Hikayat Abi al-Qasim, a mysterious text surviving in a single manuscript, to other comical banquet texts and party-crashing characters, especially from Ancient Greece and Rome.
Explores the intricately crafted rhetorical strategies used by al-Jahiz in his letters The 9th-century essayist, theologian and encyclopedist 'Amr b. Bahr al-Jahiz has long been acknowledged as a master of early Arabic prose writing. Many of his most engaging writings were clearly intended for a broad readership but were presented as letters to individuals. Despite the importance and quantity of these letters, surprisingly little academic notice has been paid to them. Now, Thomas Hefter takes a new approach in interpreting some of al-Jahiz's 'epistolary monographs'. By focusing on the varying ways in which he wrote to the addressee, Hefter shows how al-Jahiz shaped his conversations on the page in order to guide (or manipulate) his actual readers and encourage them to engage with his complex materials.
Explores the experiences spectators have when they watch a film collectively in a cinema.
During the rise of Islam, Muslim fascination with Christian monastic life was articulated through a fluid, piety-centred movement. Bradley Bowman explores this confessional synthesis between like-minded religious groups in the medieval Near East. He argues that this potential ecumenism would have been based upon the sharing of core tenets concerning piety and righteous behaviour. Such fundamental attributes, long associated with monasticism in the East, likely served as a mutually inclusive common ground for Muslim and Christian communities of the period. This manifested itself in Muslim appreciation, interest and - at times - participation in Christian monastic life.
12 essays by international experts look at how cognition is explicitly or implicitly conceived of as distributed across brain, body and world in Greek and Roman technology, science, medicine, material culture, philosophy and literary studies.
Challenges traditional Hollywood-derived models of star studiesIs classical Hollywood stardom the last word on film stars? How do film stars function in non-Hollywood contexts, such as Bollywood, East Asia and Latin America, and what new developments has screen stardom undergone in recent years, both in Hollywood and elsewhere? Gathering together the most important new research on star studies, with case studies of stars from many different cultures, this diverse and dynamic collection looks at film stardom from new angles, challenging the received wisdom on the subject and raising important questions about image, performance, bodies, voices and fans in cultures across the globe. From Hollyw...