Music of the Sirens

Music of the Sirens
Author: Linda Austern
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 440
Release: 2006-07-21
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9780253112071

Whether referred to as mermaid, usalka, mami wata, or by some other name, and whether considered an imaginary being or merely a person with extraordinary abilities, the siren is the remarkable creature that has inspired music and its representations from ancient Greece to present-day Africa and Latin America. This book, co-edited by a historical musicologist and an ethnomusicologist, brings together leading scholars and some talented newcomers in classics, music, media studies, literature, and cultural studies to consider the siren and her multifaceted relationships to music across human time and geography.

Tennyson’s Poems

Tennyson’s Poems
Author: R. H. Winnick
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2019-04-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1783746645

In Tennyson’s Poems: New Textual Parallels, R. H. Winnick identifies more than a thousand previously unknown instances in which Tennyson phrases of two or three to as many as several words are similar or identical to those occurring in prior works by other hands—discoveries aided by the proliferation of digitized texts and the related development of powerful search tools over the three decades since the most recent major edition of Tennyson’s poems was published. Each of these instances may be deemed an allusion (meant to be recognized as such and pointing, for definable purposes, to a particular antecedent text), an echo (conscious or not, deliberate or not, meant to be noticed or not, meaningful or not), or merely accidental. Unless accidental, Winnick writes, these new textual parallels significantly expand our knowledge both of Tennyson’s reading and of his thematic intentions and artistic technique. Coupled with the thousand-plus textual parallels previously reported by Christopher Ricks and other scholars, he says, they suggest that a fundamental and lifelong aspect of Tennyson’s art was his habit of echoing any work, ancient or modern, which had the potential to enhance the resonance or deepen the meaning of his poems. The new textual parallels Winnick has identified point most often to the King James Bible and to such canonical authors as Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Thomson, Cowper, Shelley, Byron, and Wordsworth. But they also point to many authors rarely if ever previously cited in Tennyson editions and studies, including Michael Drayton, Richard Blackmore, Isaac Watts, Erasmus Darwin, John Ogilvie, Anna Lætitia Barbauld, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, John Wilson, and—with surprising frequency—Felicia Hemans. Tennyson’s Poems: New Textual Parallels is thus a major new resource for Tennyson scholars and students, an indispensable adjunct to the 1987 edition of Tennyson’s complete poems edited by Christopher Ricks.

A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres

A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres
Author: George Gascoigne
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
Total Pages: 781
Release: 2000
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780198117797

This is the only edition of George Gascoigne's A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres to respect the integrity of the first edition, which he published as an anonymous anthology in 1573. Earlier editors either based their work on The Posies of George Gascoigne Esquire, self-censored and published in1575, or omitted the two plays, Supposes and Jocasta. But, from a bibliographical point of view, the plays are an integral part of the first edition, and the work that suffers most from revision is Gascoigne's masterpiece, The Adventures of Master F.J. The critical apparatus of this edition allowsthe reader to reconstruct the changes Gascoigne made to The Posies, and all the works which appear there for the first time are included. Half of the works in this edition, including the plays and Gascoigne's longest poem, `The fruites of Warre', have never received any commentary before. The commentary closely studies Gascoigne's use of his sources, especially in his translations from the Italian, and situates his works in theirliterary and social milieux. It also includes all of the extensive marginal notes that Gabriel Harvey made in his copy of The Posies. The biographical introduction corrects a number of mistakes in Prouty's standard biography and, in particular, offers a fuller, more accurate account of Gascoigne'smilitary service in the Netherlands.