Mignon's Afterlives

Mignon's Afterlives PDF Author: Terence Cave
Publisher: OUP UK
ISBN: 0199604800
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
Terence Cave traces the afterlives of Mignon, an apparently minor character in Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, through the European cultures of the 19th and 20th centuries. The enigmatic and fascinating Mignon reappears in wide range of different works, mainly narrative fiction but also poetry, song, opera, and film.

Mignon's Afterlives

Mignon's Afterlives PDF Author: Terence Cave
Publisher: OUP UK
ISBN: 0199604800
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 323

Get Book Here

Book Description
Terence Cave traces the afterlives of Mignon, an apparently minor character in Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, through the European cultures of the 19th and 20th centuries. The enigmatic and fascinating Mignon reappears in wide range of different works, mainly narrative fiction but also poetry, song, opera, and film.

The Drowned Muse

The Drowned Muse PDF Author: Anne-Gaëlle Saliot
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 019101897X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
The Drowned Muse is a study of the extraordinary destiny, in the history of European culture, of an object which could seem, at first glance, quite ordinary in the history of European culture. It tells the story of a mask, the cast of a young girl's face entitled "L'Inconnue de la Seine," the Unknown Woman of the Seine, and its subsequent metamorphoses as a cultural figure. Legend has it that the "Inconnue" drowned herself in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century. The forensic scientist tending to her unidentified corpse at the Paris Morgue was supposedly so struck by her allure that he captured in plaster the contours of her face. This unknown girl, also referred to as "The Mona Lisa of Suicide", has since become the object of an obsessive interest that started in the late 1890s, reached its peak in the 1930s, and continues to reverberate today. Aby Warburg defines art history as "a ghost story for grown-ups." This study is similarly "a ghost story for grown-ups", narrating the aura of a cultural object that crosses temporal, geographical, and linguistic frontiers. It views the "Inconnue" as a symptomatic expression of a modern world haunted by the earlier modernity of the nineteenth century. It investigates how the mask's metamorphoses reflect major shifts in the cultural history of the last two centuries, approaching the "Inconnue" as an entry point to understand a phenomenon characteristic of 20th- and 21st-century modernity: the translatability of media. Doing so, this study mobilizes discourses surrounding the "Inconnue", casting them as points of negotiation through which we may consider the modern age.

The Lied at the Crossroads of Performance and Musicology

The Lied at the Crossroads of Performance and Musicology PDF Author: Benjamin Binder
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009008528
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
There seems to be an essential relationship between the performance and the scholarship of the German Lied. Yet the process by which scholarly inquiry and performative practices mutually benefit one another can appear mysterious and undefined, in part because any dialogue between the two invariably unfolds in relatively informal environments – such as the rehearsal studio, seminar room or conference workshop. Contributions from leading musicologists and prominent Lied performers here build on and deepen these interactions to reconsider topics including Werktreue aesthetics and concert practices; the authority of the composer versus the performer; the value of lesser-known, incomplete, or compositionally modified songs; and the traditions, habits and prejudices of song recitalists regarding issues like transposition, programming and dramatic modes of presentation. The book as a whole reveals the reciprocal relevance of Lied musicology and Lied performance, thereby opening doors to fresh and exciting modes of interpretative artistry and intellectual discovery.

Thinking on Thresholds

Thinking on Thresholds PDF Author: Subha Mukherji
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 085728665X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
Through a combination of case studies and theoretical investigations, the essays in this book address the imaginative power of the threshold as a productive space in literature and art.

Opera Acts

Opera Acts PDF Author: Karen Henson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316194175
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Opera Acts explores a wealth of new historical material about singers in the late nineteenth century and challenges the idea that this was a period of decline for the opera singer. In detailed case studies of four figures - the late Verdi baritone Victor Maurel; Bizet's first Carmen, Célestine Galli-Marié; Massenet's muse of the 1880s and 1890s, Sibyl Sanderson; and the early Wagner star Jean de Reszke - Karen Henson argues that singers in the late nineteenth century continued to be important, but in ways that were not conventionally 'vocal'. Instead they enjoyed a freedom and creativity based on their ability to express text, act and communicate physically, and exploit the era's media. By these and other means, singers played a crucial role in the creation of opera up to the end of the nineteenth century.

Thinking with Literature

Thinking with Literature PDF Author: Terence Cave
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198749414
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
Thinking with Literature offers a succinct introduction to a cognitive literary criticsm. Broad in scope but focusing on a particular cluster of approaches, it aims to induce a change of perspective in the reader.

Retrospectives

Retrospectives PDF Author: Neil Kenny
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351194690
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 371

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Book Description
"Terence Cave's work has made a major contribution to the rethinking of the relationship between literature, history and culture over the last half-century. Retrospectives brings together substantially revised versions of studies written since 1970: together they constitute a searching methodological investigation of the practice of reading past texts. How do our ways of reading such texts compare with those practised in the periods when they were written? How do we distinguish between what a text meant in its own time and what it has come to mean over time? And how might reading provide access to past experiences? The book's epicentre is early modern French culture, but it extends to that culture's ancient Greek and Roman models, its European contexts, and the afterlives of some of its themes, from Pascal via George Eliot to Angela Carter."

Intimacy, Performance, and the Lied in the Early Nineteenth Century

Intimacy, Performance, and the Lied in the Early Nineteenth Century PDF Author: Jennifer Ronyak
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253035805
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
The German lied, or art song, is considered one of the most intimate of all musical genres—often focused on the poetic speaker's inner world and best suited for private and semi-private performance in the home or salon. Yet, problematically, any sense of inwardness in lieder depends on outward expression through performance. With this paradox at its heart, Intimacy, Performance, and the Lied in the Early Nineteenth Century explores the relationships between early nineteenth-century theories of the inward self, the performance practices surrounding inward lyric poetry and song, and the larger conventions determining the place of intimate poetry and song in the public concert hall. Jennifer Ronyak studies the cultural practices surrounding lieder performances in northern and central Germany in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, demonstrating how presentations of lieder during the formative years of the genre put pressure on their sense of interiority. She examines how musicians responded to public concern that outward expression would leave the interiority of the poet, the song, or the performer unguarded and susceptible to danger. Through this rich performative paradox Ronyak reveals how a song maintains its powerful intimacy even during its inherently public performance.

Misanthropy in the Age of Reason

Misanthropy in the Age of Reason PDF Author: Joseph Harris
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192867571
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Ever since Timon of Athens shunned his fellow-countrymen and went to live out in the wilderness, the misanthrope has proved to be a fascinating but troubling figure for writers and thinkers. This comparative study brings together a range of material from various genres, periods, and countries to explore the developing status of misanthropy in the European literary and intellectual imagination from the late Renaissance to the dawn of Romanticism. During this period, the term 'misanthropy' shifts from being an obscure Greek calque to being almost banal in its ubiquity. In order to trace the contours of the period's evolving attitudes towards misanthropy, this study takes a combined thematic and historical approach. After two chapters offering close readings of the period's key icons of misanthropy--Shakespeare's Timon of Athens and Molière's Alceste--the remaining six chapters each explore different thematic issues of misanthropy as they surface across the period. Drawing on works by Shakespeare, Molière, Hobbes, Pascal, Rochester, Swift, Rousseau, Kotzebue, Schiller, Wollstonecraft, and Leopardi, as well as countless less canonical writers, this study demonstrates that the misanthrope is not a fixed, stable figure in early modern literature. Rather, he--or very occasionally she--emerges in many guises, from philosopher to comic grouch, from tragic hero to moral censor, from cynical villain to disappointed idealist, from quasi-bestial outsider to worldly satirist. As both critic of humanity and object of critical scrutiny, the misanthrope challenges straightforward oppositions between individual and society, virtue and vice, reason and folly, human and animal.

Human Forms

Human Forms PDF Author: Ian Duncan
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691264783
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
A major rethinking of the European novel and its relationship to early evolutionary science The 120 years between Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749) and George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871) marked both the rise of the novel and the shift from the presumption of a stable, universal human nature to one that changes over time. In Human Forms, Ian Duncan reorients our understanding of the novel's formation during its cultural ascendancy, arguing that fiction produced new knowledge in a period characterized by the interplay between literary and scientific discourses—even as the two were separating into distinct domains. Duncan focuses on several crisis points: the contentious formation of a natural history of the human species in the late Enlightenment; the emergence of new genres such as the Romantic bildungsroman; historical novels by Walter Scott and Victor Hugo that confronted the dissolution of the idea of a fixed human nature; Charles Dickens's transformist aesthetic and its challenge to Victorian realism; and George Eliot's reckoning with the nineteenth-century revolutions in the human and natural sciences. Modeling the modern scientific conception of a developmental human nature, the novel became a major experimental instrument for managing the new set of divisions—between nature and history, individual and species, human and biological life—that replaced the ancient schism between animal body and immortal soul. The first book to explore the interaction of European fiction with "the natural history of man" from the late Enlightenment through the mid-Victorian era, Human Forms sets a new standard for work on natural history and the novel.