Music and the Queer Body in English Literature at the Fin de Siècle

Music and the Queer Body in English Literature at the Fin de Siècle
Author: Fraser Riddell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2022-04-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108996337

Drawing on an ambitious range of interdisciplinary material, including literature, musical treatises and theoretical texts, Music and the Queer Body explores the central place music held for emergent queer identities in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Canonical writers such as Walter Pater, E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf are discussed alongside lesser-known figures such as John Addington Symonds, Vernon Lee and Arthur Symons. Engaging with a number of historical case studies, Fraser Riddell pays particular attention to the significance of embodiment in queer musical subcultures and draws on contemporary queer theory and phenomenology to show how writers associate music with shameful, masochistic and anti-humanist subject positions. Ultimately, this study reveals how literary texts at the fin de siècle invest music with queer agency: to challenge or refuse essentialist identities, to facilitate re-conceptions of embodied subjectivity, and to present alternative sensory experiences of space and time. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

The Oxford Handbook of Decadence

The Oxford Handbook of Decadence
Author: Jane Desmarais
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 745
Release: 2022
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0190066954

Edited by Jane Desmarais and David Weir.

Sounding Bodies

Sounding Bodies
Author: Shannon Draucker
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2024-07-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 143849839X

Can the concert hall be as erotic as the bedroom? Many Victorian writers believed so. In the mid-nineteenth century, acoustical scientists such as Hermann von Helmholtz and John Tyndall described music as a set of physical vibrations that tickled the ear, excited the nerves, and precipitated muscular convulsions. In turn, writers—from canonical figures such as George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, to New Women novelists like Sarah Grand and Bertha Thomas, to anonymous authors of underground pornography—depicted bodily sensations and experiences in unusually explicit ways. These writers used scenes of music listening and performance to intervene in urgent conversations about gender and sexuality and explore issues of agency, pleasure, violence, desire, and kinship. Sounding Bodies shows how both classical music and Victorian literature, while often considered bastions of conservatism and repression, represented powerful sites for feminist and queer politics.

The Life of Breath in Literature, Culture and Medicine

The Life of Breath in Literature, Culture and Medicine
Author: David Fuller
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 558
Release: 2021-10-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030744434

This open access book studies breath and breathing in literature and culture and provides crucial insights into the history of medicine, health and the emotions, the foundations of beliefs concerning body, spirit and world, the connections between breath and creativity and the phenomenology of breath and breathlessness. Contributions span the classical, medieval, early modern, Romantic, Victorian, modern and contemporary periods, drawing on medical writings, philosophy, theology and the visual arts as well as on literary, historical and cultural studies. The collection illustrates the complex significance and symbolic power of breath and breathlessness across time: breath is written deeply into ideas of nature, spirituality, emotion, creativity and being, and is inextricable from notions of consciousness, spirit, inspiration, voice, feeling, freedom and movement. The volume also demonstrates the long-standing connections between breath and place, politics and aesthetics, illuminating both contrasts and continuities.

Walter Pater and the Beginnings of English Studies

Walter Pater and the Beginnings of English Studies
Author: Charles Martindale
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2023-10-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108835899

The first collected study of Pater's significance to criticism, revealing his pivotal role in establishing principles of the literary essay.

Scale, Crisis, and the Modern Novel

Scale, Crisis, and the Modern Novel
Author: Aaron Rosenberg
Publisher:
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2023-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1009271822

At the turn of the twentieth century, novelists faced an unprecedented crisis of scale. While exponential increases in industrial production, resource extraction, and technological complexity accelerated daily life, growing concerns about deep time, evolution, globalization, and extinction destabilised scale's value as a measure of reality. Here, Aaron Rosenberg examines how four novelists moved radically beyond novelistic realism, repurposing the genres-romance, melodrama, gothic, and epic-it had ostensibly superseded. He demonstrates how H. G. Wells, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, and Virginia Woolf engaged with climatic and ecological crises that persist today, requiring us to navigate multiple temporal and spatial scales simultaneously. The volume shows that problems of scale constrain our responses to crisis by shaping the linguistic, aesthetic, and narrative structures through which we imagine it. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

The Art of the Reprint

The Art of the Reprint
Author: Rosalind Parry
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2023-03-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1009272012

The Art of the Reprint is a vivid and engaging history of the nineteenth-century novel as it was re-imagined for everyday readers by four extraordinary twentieth-century illustrators. It focuses especially on four reprints: a 1929 edition of Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native (1878) with engravings by Clare Leighton, a 1930 edition of Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1851) with images by Rockwell Kent, a 1943 edition of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) with woodblocks by Fritz Eichenberg, and a complete set of Jane Austen's novels (1786-1817) illustrated from 1957 to 1974 by Joan Hassall. Taken together, these reprints are indicative of a legacy crafted from historical distance, through personal, political, and artistic circumstance, and for a new century. With biographical, archival, and art- and literary-historical sources as well as close readings of images and texts, this is a richly illustrated account of how artists reinvent canons for the general reader.