Elizabethan Mythologies

Elizabethan Mythologies PDF Author: Robin Headlam Wells
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521433853
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
For lovers of music and poetry the legendary figure of Orpheus probably suggests a romantic ideal. But for the Renaissance he is essentially a political figure. Mythographers interpreted the Orpheus story as an allegory of the birth of civilization because they recognized in the arts in which Orpheus excelled an instrument of social control so powerful that with it you could, as one writer put it, 'winne Cities and whole Countries'. Dealing with plays, poems, songs and the iconography of musical instruments, Robin Headlam Wells re-examines the myth, central to the Orpheus story, of the transforming power of music and poetry. Elizabethan Mythologies, first published in 1994, contains numerous illustrations from the period and will be of interest to scholars and students of Renaissance poetry, drama and music, and of the history of ideas.

Elizabethan Mythologies

Elizabethan Mythologies PDF Author: Robin Headlam Wells
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521433853
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
For lovers of music and poetry the legendary figure of Orpheus probably suggests a romantic ideal. But for the Renaissance he is essentially a political figure. Mythographers interpreted the Orpheus story as an allegory of the birth of civilization because they recognized in the arts in which Orpheus excelled an instrument of social control so powerful that with it you could, as one writer put it, 'winne Cities and whole Countries'. Dealing with plays, poems, songs and the iconography of musical instruments, Robin Headlam Wells re-examines the myth, central to the Orpheus story, of the transforming power of music and poetry. Elizabethan Mythologies, first published in 1994, contains numerous illustrations from the period and will be of interest to scholars and students of Renaissance poetry, drama and music, and of the history of ideas.

The Elizabethans

The Elizabethans PDF Author: A. N. Wilson
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374147442
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
In this Elizabethan exploration, Wilson follows the stories of privateer Francis Drake, political intriguers like William Cecil and Francis Walsingham; and Renaissance literary geniuses from Sir Philip Sidney to Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare.

The Metamorphoses of Myth in Fiction since 1960

The Metamorphoses of Myth in Fiction since 1960 PDF Author: Kathryn Hume
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501359894
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
Why do contemporary writers use myths from ancient Greece and Rome, Pharaonic Egypt, the Viking north, Africa's west coast, and Hebrew and Christian traditions? What do these stories from premodern cultures have to offer us? The Metamorphoses of Myth in Fiction since 1960 examines how myth has shaped writings by Kathy Acker, Margaret Atwood, William S. Burroughs, A. S. Byatt, Neil Gaiman, Norman Mailer, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Jeanette Winterson, and others, and contrasts such canonical texts with fantasy, speculative fiction, post-singularity fiction, pornography, horror, and graphic narratives. These artistic practices produce a feeling of meaning that doesn't need to be defined in scientific or materialist terms. Myth provides a sense of rightness, a recognition of matching a pattern, a feeling of something missing, a feeling of connection. It not only allows poetic density but also manipulates our moral judgments, or at least stimulates us to exercise them. Working across genres, populations, and critical perspectives, Kathryn Hume elicits an understanding of the current uses of mythology in fiction.

Neo-historicism

Neo-historicism PDF Author: Robin Headlam Wells
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 9780859915816
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Essays on English Renaissance culture make a major contribution to the debate on historical method.

Reverberating Song in Shakespeare and Milton

Reverberating Song in Shakespeare and Milton PDF Author: Erin Minear
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317063724
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
In this study, Erin Minear explores the fascination of Shakespeare and Milton with the ability of music-heard, imagined, or remembered-to infiltrate language. Such infected language reproduces not so much the formal or sonic properties of music as its effects. Shakespeare's and Milton's understanding of these effects was determined, she argues, by history and culture as well as individual sensibility. They portray music as uncanny and divine, expressive and opaque, promoting associative rather than logical thought processes and unearthing unexpected memories. The title reflects the multiple and overlapping meanings of reverberation in the study: the lingering and infectious nature of musical sound; the questionable status of audible, earthly music as an echo of celestial harmonies; and one writer's allusions to another. Minear argues that many of the qualities that seem to us characteristically 'Shakespearean' stem from Shakespeare's engagement with how music works-and that Milton was deeply influenced by this aspect of Shakespearean poetics. Analyzing Milton's account of Shakespeare's 'warbled notes,' she demonstrates that he saw Shakespeare as a peculiarly musical poet, deeply and obscurely moving his audience with language that has ceased to mean, but nonetheless lingers hauntingly in the mind. Obsessed with the relationship between words and music for reasons of his own, including his father's profession as a composer, Milton would adopt, adapt, and finally reject Shakespeare's form of musical poetics in his own quest to 'join the angel choir.' Offering a new way of looking at the work of two major authors, this study engages and challenges scholars of Shakespeare, Milton, and early modern culture.

Both from the Ears and Mind

Both from the Ears and Mind PDF Author: Linda Phyllis Austern
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022670159X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
Both from the Ears and Mind offers a bold new understanding of the intellectual and cultural position of music in Tudor and Stuart England. Linda Phyllis Austern brings to life the kinds of educated writings and debates that surrounded musical performance, and the remarkable ways in which English people understood music to inform other endeavors, from astrology and self-care to divinity and poetics. Music was considered both art and science, and discussions of music and musical terminology provided points of contact between otherwise discrete fields of human learning. This book demonstrates how knowledge of music permitted individuals to both reveal and conceal membership in specific social, intellectual, and ideological communities. Attending to materials that go beyond music’s conventional limits, these chapters probe the role of music in commonplace books, health-maintenance and marriage manuals, rhetorical and theological treatises, and mathematical dictionaries. Ultimately, Austern illustrates how music was an indispensable frame of reference that became central to the fabric of life during a time of tremendous intellectual, social, and technological change.

In Small Proportions

In Small Proportions PDF Author: Daniel Fischlin
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 9780814326930
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
The English "ayre", which enjoyed a short vogue from about 1596 to 1622, is a distinctive subgenre of the lyric. Based on Edward Doughtie's seminal critical edition, LYRICS FROM ENGLISH AIRS, 1596-1622 and published in 1970, SMALL PROPORTIONS provides the first extended examination of the ayre's literary devices and attributes. 25 illustrations.

Dowland: Lachrimae (1604)

Dowland: Lachrimae (1604) PDF Author: Peter Holman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521588294
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 120

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Book Description
Dowland's Lachrimae (1604) is perhaps the greatest but most enigmatic publication of instrumental music from before the eighteenth century. This new handbook, the first detailed study of the collection, investigates its publication history, its instrumentation, its place in the history of Renaissance dance music, and its reception history. Two extended chapters examine the twenty-one pieces in the collection in detail, discussing the complex internal relationships between the cycle of seven 'Lachrimae' pavans, the relationships between them and other pieces inside and outside the collection, and possible connections between the Latin titles of the seven pavans and Elizabethan conceptions of melancholy. The extraordinarily multi-faceted nature of the collection also leads the author to illuminate questions of patronage, the ordering and format of the collection, pitch and transposition, tonality and modality, and even numerology.

English Renaissance Rhetoric and Poetics

English Renaissance Rhetoric and Poetics PDF Author: Heinrich F Plett
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004617183
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 536

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Book Description
This comprehensive bibliography lists some 500 source texts published in the British Isles or abroad from 1479 to 1660 and more than 2,000 works of secondary literature from 1900 to the present.

Gender and Song in Early Modern England

Gender and Song in Early Modern England PDF Author: Leslie C. Dunn
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317130480
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Song offers a vital case study for examining the rich interplay of music, gender, and representation in the early modern period. This collection engages with the question of how gender informed song within particular textual, social, and spatial contexts in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Bringing together ongoing work in musicology, literary studies, and film studies, it elaborates an interdisciplinary consideration of the embodied and gendered facets of song, and of song’s capacity to function as a powerful-and flexible-gendered signifier. The essays in this collection draw vivid attention to song as a situated textual and musical practice, and to the gendered processes and spaces of song's circulation and reception. In so doing, they interrogate the literary and cultural significance of song for early modern readers, performers, and audiences.