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The book examines the perception of the organist as the most influential musical figure in Victorian society through the writings of Thomas Hardy and Robert Browning. This will be the first book in the burgeoning area of research into the relationship of music and literature that examines the societal perceptions of a figure central to civic life in Victorian England. This book is deliberately interdisciplinary and will be of special interest to literature scholars and students of Victorian studies, culture, society, religion, gender studies, and music. However, the nature of the text does not require specialist knowledge of music.
Framing timely and pressing questions concerning music and cultural rights, this collection illustrates the ways in which music--as a cultural practice, a commercial product, and an aesthetic form--has become enmeshed in debates about human rights, international law, and struggles for social justice. The essays in this volume examine how interpretations of cultural rights vary across societies; how definitions of rights have evolved; and how rights have been invoked in relation to social struggles over cultural access, use, representation, and ownership. The individual case studies, many of them based on ethnographic field research, demonstrate how musical aspects of cultural rights play out in specific cultural contexts, including the Philippines, China, Hawaii, Peru, Ukraine, and Brazil. Contributors are Nimrod Baranovitch, Adriana Helbig, Javier F. Leon, Ana María Ochoa, Silvia Ramos, Helen Rees, Felicia Sandler, Amy Ku'uleialoha Stillman, Ricardo D. Trimillos, Andrew N. Weintraub, and Bell Yung.
Rock and Romanticism: Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms explores the relationships among the musical genres of post-punk, goth, and metal and American and European Romanticisms traditionally understood. It argues that these contemporary forms of music are not only influenced by but are an expression of Romanticism continuous with their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century influences. Figures such as Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Friedrich, Schlegel, and Hoffman are brought alongside the music and visual aesthetics of the Rolling Stones, the New Romantics, the Pretenders, Joy Division, Nick Cave, Tom Verlaine, emo, Eminem, My Dying Bride, and Norwegian black metal to explore the ways that Romanticism continues into the present in all of its varying forms and expressions.
Music and Sound in the Life and Literature of James Joyce: Joyces Noyces offers a fresh perspective on the Irish writer James Joyce’s much-noted obsession with music. This book provides an overview of a century-old critical tradition focused on Joyce and music, as well as six in-depth case studies which revisit material from the writer’s career in the light of new and emerging theories. Considering both Irish cultural history and the European art music tradition, the book combines approaches from cultural musicology, critical theory, sound studies and Irish studies. Chapters explore Joyce’s use of repetition, his response to literary Wagnerism, the role and status of music in the aesthetic and political debates of the fin de siècle, music and cultural nationalism, ubiquitous urban sound and ‘shanty aesthetics’. Gerry Smyth revitalizes Joyce’s work in relation to the ‘noisy’ world in which the author wrote (and his audience read) his work.
Theory without practice is empty, practice without theory is blind, to adapt a phrase from Immanuel Kant. The sentiment could not be truer of cultural heritage ethics. This intra-disciplinary book bridges the gap between theory and practice by bringing together a stellar cast of academics, activists, consultants, journalists, lawyers, and museum practitioners, each contributing their own expertise to the wider debate of what cultural heritage means in the twenty-first century. Cultural Heritage Ethics provides cutting-edge arguments built on case studies of cultural heritage and its management in a range of geographical and cultural contexts. Moreover, the volume feels the pulse of the debat...
In Heavy Metal Music in Latin America: Perspectives from the Distorted South, the editors bring together scholars engaged in the study of heavy metal music in Latin America to reflect on the heavy metal genre from a regional perspective. The contributors’ southern voices diversify metal scholarship in the global north. An extreme musical genre for an extreme region, the contributors explore how issues like colonialism, dictatorships, violence, ethnic extermination and political persecution have shaped heavy metal music in Latin America, and how music has helped shape Latin American culture and politics.
WILDE NOWreads Oscar Wilde through our now, through a contemporary sensibility (and approach), in which literature and popular culture interrogate and are interrogated by critical concepts and categories such as performance, celebrity, intermediality, and consumerism. This volume exceeds the shape and meaning of a critical study to turn into a drama of five different acts/moments in Wilde’s life and work: his early performances in Dublin, London and Oxford; the 1882 American tour; his successful season of the first half of the 1890s, his prison years and finally his glorious resurrection in contemporary pop culture. Most importantly WILDE NOW approaches these moments through contemporary r...
Music and the Environment in Dystopian Narrative: Sounding the Disaster investigates the active role of music in film and fiction portraying climate crisis. From contemporary science fiction and environmental film to “Anthropocene opera,” the most arresting eco-narratives draw less on background music than on the power of sound to move fictional action and those who receive it. Beginning with a reflection on a Mozart recording on the 1970s’ Voyager Golden Record, this book explores links between music and violence in Lidia Yuknavitch’s 2017 novel The Book of Joan, songless speech in the opera Persephone in the Late Anthropocene, interrupted lyricism in the eco-documentary Expedition to the End of the World, and dread-inducing hurricane music in the Brecht-Weill opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. In all of these works, music allows for a state of critical vulnerability in its hearers, communicating planetary crisis in an embodied way.
Cosmopolitanism and Transatlantic Circles in Music and Literature traces the transatlantic networks that were constructed between a select group of composers, including Edvard Grieg, Edward MacDowell, and Percy Grainger, and the writers with whom they shared cosmopolitan affinities, including Arne Garborg, Hamlin Garland, Madison Grant, and Lathrop Stoddard. Each overlapping case study surveys the diachronic transmission of cosmopolitanism as well as the synchronic practices that animated these modernist ideas. Instead of taking a strictly chronological approach to organization, each chapter offers an examination of the different layers of identity that expanded and contracted in relation to a mutual interest in Nordic culture. From the burgeoning “universal” ambitions around 1900 to the darker racialized discourse of the 1920s, this study offers a critical analysis of both the idea and practice of cosmopolitanism in order to expose its common foundations as well as the limits of its application.
This book examines the trope of echo in early modern literature and drama, exploring the musical, sonic, and verbal effects generated by forms of repetition on stage and in print. Focusing on examples where Echo herself appears as a character, this study shows how echoic techniques permeated literary, dramatic, and musical performance in the period, and puts forward echo as a model for engaging with sounds and texts from the past. Starting with sixteenth century translations of myths of Echo from Ovid and Longus, the book moves through the uses of echo in Elizabethan progress entertainments, commercial and court drama, Jacobean court masques, and prose romance. It places the work of well-known dramatists, such as Ben Jonson and John Webster, in the context of broader cultures of performance. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of early modern drama, music, and dance.