This book offers a close survey of the changing audiences, modes of reading, and cultural expectations that shaped epic writing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
According to Anthony Welch, ...the theory and practice of epic poetry in this period-including little-known attempts by many epic poets to have their work orally recited or set to music-must be understood in the context of Renaissance musical humanism. Welch's approach leads to a fresh perspective on a literary culture that stood on the brink of a new relationship with antiquity and on the history of music in the early modern era.
In Music in the Holocaust Shirli Gilbert provides the first large-scale, critical account of the role of music amongst communities imprisoned under Nazism. She documents a wide scope of musical ...activities, ranging from orchestras and chamber groups to choirs, theatres, communal sing-songs, and cabarets, in some of the most important internment centres in Nazi-occupied Europe, including Auschwitz and the Warsaw and Vilna ghettos. Gilbert is also concerned with exploring the ways in which music - particularly the many songs that were preserved - contribute to our broader understanding of the Holocaust and the experiences of its victims. Music in the Holocaust is, at its core, a social history, taking as its focus the lives of individuals and communities imprisoned under Nazism. Music opens a unique window on to the internal world of those communities, offering insight into how they understood, interpreted, and responded to their experiences at the time.
The Musical Heritage of Al-Andalus is a critical account of the history of Andalusian music in Iberia from the Islamic conquest of 711 to the final expulsion of the Moriscos (Spanish Muslims ...converted to Christianity) in the early 17th century. This volume presents the documentation that has come down to us, accompanied by critical and detailed analyses of the sources written in Arabic, Old Catalan, Castilian, Hebrew, and Latin. It is also informed by research the author has conducted on modern Andalusian musical traditions in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon and Syria. While the cultural achievements of medieval Muslim Spain have been the topic of a large number of scholarly and popular publications in recent decades, what may arguably be its most enduring contribution – music – has been almost entirely neglected. The overarching purpose of this work is to elucidate as clearly as possible the many different types of musical interactions that took place in medieval Iberia and the complexity of the various borrowings, adaptations, hybridizations, and appropriations involved.
This volume explores the meaning of republicanism in contemporary Ireland. While this has often been identified simply with nationalism, the book examines the connections, comparisons and contrasts ...between Irish republicanism and other strands of republican politics: the ideology and practice of official French republicanism, the broader European and American civic republican tradition and the contemporary revival of this tradition of citizenship. Academics from different disciplines, along with statesmen and politicians from different political perspectives, are brought together to examine the relationship of historical and contemporary Irish republicanism to the wider republican theoretical tradition. The book analyses political positions among those parties describing themselves as republican in Ireland in the twenty-first century and examines the possible relevance of the ideas of the broader republican tradition for future politics in Ireland.
Challenging a long-standing trend that sees the Renaissance as the end of communal identity and constitutive group affiliation, author Joshua Phillips explores the perseverance of such affiliation ...throughout Tudor culture.
Focusing on prose fiction from Malory's Morte Darthur through the works of Sir Philip Sidney and Thomas Nashe, this study explores the concept of collective agency and the extensive impact it had on English Renaissance culture.
In contrast to studies devoted to the myth of early modern individuation, English Fictions of Communal Identity, 1485-1603 pays special attention to primary communities-monastic orders, printing house concerns, literary circles, and neighborhoods-that continued to generate a collective sense of identity.
Ultimately, Phillips offers a new way of theorizing the relation between collaboration and identity.
In terms of literary history, this study elucidates a significant aspect of novelistic discourse, even as it accounts for the institutional disregard of often brilliant works of early modern fiction.
Over thirty years after the first narratives written in Italian by migrants, this book considers one of the distinctive characteristics of their writing, namely the massive presence of words and ...expressions in their mother tongue, which are thus kept alive in the new language and offered to Italian readers. The research is conducted on a specific corpus of 157 short stories and novels published in Italy between 1990 and 2020, written by 91 authors from 34 different countries. Over 500 words have been extracted and collected in a glossary: the abundance of graphic variants, the grammatical class adopted in Italian, the languages of origin (at least 30 ascertainable) and the most frequent semantic fields are detected. The diffusion of these migrant words is also considered as a sign of a possible lexical renewal due to the contact between Italian and migrant languages.
In 1899, the United Fruit Company (UFCO) was officially incorporated in Boston, Massachusetts, beginning an era of economic, diplomatic, and military interventions in Central America. This event ...marked the inception of the struggle for economic, political, and cultural autonomy in Central America as well as an era of homegrown inequities, injustices, and impunities to which Central Americans have responded in creative and critical ways. This juncture also set the conditions for the creation of the Transisthmus—a material, cultural, and symbolic site of vast intersections of people, products, and narratives. Taking 1899 as her point of departure, Ana Patricia Rodríguez offers a comprehensive, comparative, and meticulously researched book covering more than one hundred years, between 1899 and 2007, of modern cultural and literary production and modern empire-building in Central America. She examines the grand narratives of (anti)imperialism, revolution, subalternity, globalization, impunity, transnational migration, and diaspora, as well as other discursive, historical, and material configurations of the region beyond its geophysical and political confines. Focusing in particular on how the material productions and symbolic tropes of cacao, coffee, indigo, bananas, canals, waste, and transmigrant labor have shaped the transisthmian cultural and literary imaginaries, Rodríguez develops new methodological approaches for studying cultural production in Central America and its diasporas. Monumental in scope and relentlessly impassioned, this work offers new critical readings of Central American narratives and contributes to the growing field of Central American studies.
This book surveys the entire range of crime films, including important subgenres such as the gangster film, the private eye film, film noir, as well as the victim film, the erotic thriller, and the ...crime comedy. Focusing on ten films that span the range of the twentieth century, Thomas Leitch traces the transformation of the three leading figures that are common to all crime films: the criminal, the victim and the avenger. Analyzing how each of the subgenres establishes oppositions among its ritual antagonists, he shows how the distinctions among them become blurred throughout the course of the century. This blurring, Leitch maintains, reflects and fosters a deep social ambivalence towards crime and criminals, while the criminal, victim and avenger characters effectively map the shifting relations between subgenres, such as the erotic thriller and the police film, within the larger genre of crime film that informs them all.
Over the past century, narratives of travel changed in response to modernist and postmodernist literary innovation, world wars, the demise of European empires, and the effect of new technologies and ...media on travel experience. Yet existing critical studies have not examined fully how the genre changes or theorized why. This study investigates the evolution of Anglophone travel narrative from the 1920s to the present, addressing the work of canonical authors such as T. E. Lawrence, W. H. Auden and Rebecca West; best-sellers by Peter Fleming and H. V. Morton; and texts by Colin Thubron, Andrew X. Pham, Rosemary Mahoney, and others. It argues that the genre's most important transformation lies in its reinvention as a means of narrating the subjective experience of violence, cultural upheaval, and decline. It will interest scholars and students of travel writing, modernism and postmodernism, English and American literature, and the history and sociology of travel.
Is there a moment in history when a work receives its ideal interpretation? Or is perpetual negotiation required to preserve the past and accommodate the present? The freedom of interpretation, ...Charles Rosen suggests in these sparkling explorations, exists in a delicate balance with fidelity to the identity of the original work.