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Author: David Deutsch Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1474235832 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 273
Book Description
British Literature and Classical Music explores literary representations of classical music in early 20th century British writing. Covering authors ranging from T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf to Aldous Huxley, H.G. Wells and D.H. Lawrence, the book examines literature produced during a period of widely proliferating philosophical, educational, and performance-oriented musical activities in both public and private settings. David Deutsch demonstrates how this proliferation caused classical music to become an increasingly vital element of British culture and a vehicle for exploring contentious issues such as social mobility, sexual freedoms, and international political rivalries. Through the use of archives of concert programs, cult novels, and letters written during the First and Second World Wars, the book examines how authors both celebrated and satirized the musicality of the lower-middle and working classes, same-sex desiring individuals, and cosmopolitan promoters of a shared European culture to depict these groups as valuable members of and - less frequently as threats to – British life.
Author: David Deutsch Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1474235832 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 273
Book Description
British Literature and Classical Music explores literary representations of classical music in early 20th century British writing. Covering authors ranging from T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf to Aldous Huxley, H.G. Wells and D.H. Lawrence, the book examines literature produced during a period of widely proliferating philosophical, educational, and performance-oriented musical activities in both public and private settings. David Deutsch demonstrates how this proliferation caused classical music to become an increasingly vital element of British culture and a vehicle for exploring contentious issues such as social mobility, sexual freedoms, and international political rivalries. Through the use of archives of concert programs, cult novels, and letters written during the First and Second World Wars, the book examines how authors both celebrated and satirized the musicality of the lower-middle and working classes, same-sex desiring individuals, and cosmopolitan promoters of a shared European culture to depict these groups as valuable members of and - less frequently as threats to – British life.
Author: David Henry Deutsch Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages :
Book Description
Abstract: This dissertation examines the importance of classical music portrayed in British literature as a means to indicate social worth, intellectual ability, and political identity. Most scholars of music and literature emphasize the abstract, avant-garde influence of quartets and fugues on novels and poetry, overlooking the broader cultural implications of music in Britain. This project demonstrates how, from the 1870s, authors such as Benjamin Jowett, Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde used diverse appreciations of opera and instrumental music to make socio-economic and moral distinctions, as well as to portray political cohesion through communal pleasures. Turning to literature written after 1900, I show how modernist authors such as T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf revised these late-Victorian themes and used an ability to understand classical music as a litmus test for determining a character's placement within intellectual hierarchies. To locate these literary concerns within their cultural context, I uncover how journalists depicted concerts in domestic and institutional settings to indicate the value of communities that could create and sustain an art increasingly recognized as nationally important. Having established the social significance of classical music, I detail how writers relied on musical proclivities to justify the value of alienated subcultures to the larger British populace. Arnold Bennett and Thomas Burke depict the allegedly uncultured lower-middle and working classes as engaged with operas and oratorios as a means to assert their respectability. Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and twentieth-century authors such as Beverley Nichols and A.T. Fitzroy did the same for homosexual characters. I argue that these depictions are historically accurate by investigating working-class memoirs, contemporary cultural critiques, as well as unpublished documents pertaining to music in lower-income schools and concert halls. Moving beyond class and sexuality, E.M. Forster and G.B. Shaw depicted British citizens as enjoying continental European classical music as a means to explore the relationships between Britain and Germany. They represent a series of authors who used German classical music as a means to create connections between the liberal and peaceful factions of British and German societies during two world wars. By examining concert programs and letters printed in popular newspapers, I argue that these literary themes were prevalent throughout British culture. This study proves that, rather than acting as an abstruse art, classical music was fundamental to definitions of social and national identities in literature.
Author: Anna Snaith Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1108809200 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 750
Book Description
What does it mean to write in and about sound? How can literature, seemingly a silent, visual medium, be sound-bearing? This volume considers these questions by attending to the energy generated by the sonic in literary studies from the late nineteenth century to the present. Sound, whether understood as noise, music, rhythm, voice or vibration, has long shaped literary cultures and their scholarship. In original chapters written by leading scholars in the field, this book tunes in to the literary text as a site of vocalisation, rhythmics and dissonance, as well as an archive of soundscapes, modes of listening, and sound technologies. Sound and Literature is unique for the breadth and plurality of its approach, and for its interrogation and methodological mapping of the field of literary sound studies.
Author: Leslie Ritchie Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1351536613 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 288
Book Description
Combining new musicology trends, formal musical analysis, and literary feminist recovery work, Leslie Ritchie examines rare poetic, didactic, fictional, and musical texts written by women in late eighteenth-century Britain. She finds instances of and resistance to contemporary perceptions of music as a form of social control in works by Maria Barth?mon, Harriett Abrams, Mary Worgan, Susanna Rowson, Hannah Cowley, and Amelia Opie, among others. Relating women's musical compositions and writings about music to theories of music's function in the formation of female subjectivities during the latter half of the eighteenth century, Ritchie draws on the work of cultural theorists and cultural historians, as well as feminist scholars who have explored the connection between femininity and performance. Whether crafting works consonant with societal ideals of charitable, natural, and national order, or re-imagining their participation in these musical aids to social harmony, women contributed significantly to the formation of British cultural identity. Ritchie's interdisciplinary book will interest scholars working in a range of fields, including gender studies, musicology, eighteenth-century British literature, and cultural studies.
Author: Emma Sutton Publisher: Edinburgh University Press ISBN: 0748637885 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 182
Book Description
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
Author: Iain Quinn Publisher: Boydell & Brewer ISBN: 1837650829 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 252
Book Description
The majority of characters in Ian McEwan's novels are educated members of the middle class, but without any great private financial means and certainly no great affluence. Despite different occupations, whether scientist (Solar), musician (On Chesil Beach, Amsterdam) or surgeon (Saturday), they are faced with moral, ethical, religious and personal dilemmas that bear resonance to a contemporary audience. Classical music is present throughout McEwan's writings (including his recent Lessons, 2022), mostly not as an accompanying theme but as a necessary part of life's pleasures and for some, essential needs. The combination of music and the unforgettable narrative moments create a unique space for McEwan to translate his views on the world. The value of music, not least as a complementary presence to silence, is portrayed not just as the source of comfort but as a known presence that is dependable to an individual on a near spiritual level. Within his writings there is also a clear understanding of the role of the Church of England as a societal, cultural and established presence within British society. In the literary descriptions of McEwan and other authors this often extends beyond the immediate theological and ecclesiastical concerns of the day. McEwan's writings demonstrate a perceptive knowledge of the nuances of this highly specific cultural dynamic. McEwan's ability to discern sentiments that easily resonate with musicians place his contribution to the field of music and literature studies in a singular position among living writers discussing classical music in Britain. This book provokes questions for those who encounter these areas for the first time in McEwan's writings, and it offers a place of sustained enquiry for those who have experienced these fields first-hand, whether as listeners, performers, congregants, audience members or scholars across literary, musical or ecclesiastical fields. Iain Quinn's book will be of interest to scholars and students of contemporary British literature, as well as those interested in words and music studies more generally.
Author: Michelle Witen Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1350014230 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 315
Book Description
Drawing on draft manuscripts and other archival material, James Joyce and Absolute Music, explores Joyce's deep engagement with musical structure, and his participation in the growing modernist discourse surrounding 19th-century musical forms. Michelle Witen examines Joyce's claim of having structured the “Sirens” episode of his masterpiece, Ulysses, as a fuga per canonem, and his changing musical project from his early works, such as Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Informed by a deep understanding of music theory and history, the book goes on to consider the “pure music” of Joyce's final work, Finnegans Wake. Demonstrating the importance of music to Joyce, this ground-breaking study reveals new depths to this enduring body of work.
Author: Nicky Losseff Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317028066 Category : Music Languages : en Pages : 318
Book Description
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.