The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction
The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction

Author: Nicky Losseff

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-03

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 1317028066

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction seeks to address fundamental questions about the function, meaning and understanding of music in nineteenth-century culture and society, as mediated through works of fiction. The eleven essays here, written by musicologists and literary scholars, range over a wide selection of works by both canonical writers such as Austen, Benson, Carlyle, Collins, Gaskell, Gissing, Eliot, Hardy, du Maurier and Wilde, and less-well-known figures such as Gertrude Hudson and Elizabeth Sara Sheppard. Each essay explores different strategies for interpreting the idea of music in the Victorian novel. Some focus on the degree to which scenes involving music illuminate what music meant to the writer and contemporary performers and listeners, and signify musical tastes of the time and the reception of particular composers. Other essays in the volume examine aspects of gender, race, sexuality and class that are illuminated by the deployment of music by the novelist. Together with its companion volume, The Figure of Music in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry edited by Phyllis Weliver (Ashgate, 2005), this collection suggests a new network of methodologies for the continuing cultural and social investigation of nineteenth-century music as reflected in that period's literary output.

Regarding Romantic Rome
Regarding Romantic Rome

Author: Richard Wrigley

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 9783039111206

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This volume brings together a collection of essays that explore the cultural history and representation of Rome from the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century. The essays address diverse aspects of Rome as a subject and site of Romantic experience and commentary, investigating the legacy of the Grand Tour, and the changing face of Rome in the early nineteenth century. The contributions range across various media, genres, and topics - the Roman art market, paintings of contemporary Romans and their interpretation, music in and 'of' Rome, the evolution of nineteenth-century guidebooks, novels which take Rome as their narrative mise-en-scène, the idea of Rome as a setting for creative activity, ruins as polysemic metaphor, women and the reception of antiquity, the aesthetics of urban hygiene, and the mythology of that renowned quarter of Rome, Trastevere. In different ways, all of the contributions to this volume contribute to our understanding of the relationship between Rome's changing identity and the evolving forms of literary and artistic representation employed to record, evoke, commemorate, or make sense of the city, its people, and landscape.

Enlightening Romanticism, Romancing the Enlightenment
Enlightening Romanticism, Romancing the Enlightenment

Author: Miriam L. Wallace

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-05-06

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 1317142837

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

As eighteenth-century scholarship expands its range, and disciplinary boundaries such as Enlightenment and Romanticism are challenged, novels published during the rich period from 1750 to 1832 have become a contested site of critical overlap. In this volume, scholars who typically write under the rubric of either the long eighteenth century or Romanticism examine novels often claimed by both scholarly periods. This shared enterprise opens new and rich discussions of novels and novelistic concerns by creating dialogue across scholarly boundaries. Dominant narratives, critical approaches, and methodological assumptions differ in important ways, but these differences reveal a productive tension. Among the issues engaged are the eighteenth-century novel's development of emotional interiority, including theories of melancholia; the troubling heritage of the epistolary novel for the 1790s radical novel; tensions between rationality and romantic affect; issues of aesthetics and politics; and constructions of gender, genre, and race. Rather than positing a simple opposition between an eighteenth-century Enlightenment of rationality, propriety, and progress and a Romantic Period of inspiration, heroic individualism, and sublime emotionality, these essays trace the putatively 'Romantic' in the early 1700s as well as the long legacy of 'Enlightenment' values and ideas well into the nineteenth century. The volume concludes with responses from Patricia Meyer Spacks and Stephen C. Behrendt, who situate the essays and elaborate on the stakes.