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As a book on allusion, this has interest for both the traditional literary or cultural historian and for the modern student of textuality and readership positions. It focuses on allusion to folksong, and, more tangentially, to popular culture, areas which have so far been slighted by literary critics. In the nineteenth century many authors attempted to mediate the culture(s) of the working classes for the enjoyment of their predominantly middle-class audiences. In so doing they took songs out of their original social and musical contexts and employed a variety of strategies which - consciously or unconsciously - romanticised, falsified or denigrated what the novels or stories claimed to represent. In addition, some writers who were well-informed about the cultures they described used allusion to song as a covert system of reference to topics such as sexuality and the criticism of class and gender relations which it was difficult to discuss directly.
Includes songs from thirty-six countries all over the world.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1969.
This compilation of essays takes the study of the blues to a welcome new level. Distinguished scholars and well-established writers from such diverse backgrounds as musicology, anthropology, musicianship, and folklore join together to examine blues as literature, music, personal expression, and cultural product. Ramblin' on My Mind contains pieces on Ella Fitzgerald, Son House, and Robert Johnson; on the styles of vaudeville, solo guitar, and zydeco; on a comparison of blues and African music; on blues nicknames; and on lyric themes of disillusionment. Contributors are Lynn Abbott, James Bennighof, Katharine Cartwright, Andrew M. Cohen, David Evans, Bob Groom, Elliott Hurwitt, Gerhard Kubik, John Minton, Luigi Monge, and Doug Seroff.
An essential work for rock fans and scholars, Before Elvis: The Prehistory of Rock 'n' Roll surveys the origins of rock 'n' roll from the minstrel era to the emergence of Bill Haley and Elvis Presley. Unlike other histories of rock, Before Elvis offers a far broader and deeper analysis of the influences on rock music. Dispelling common misconceptions, it examines rock's origins in hokum songs and big-band boogies as well as Delta blues, detailing the embrace by white artists of African-American styles long before rock 'n' roll appeared. This unique study ranges far and wide, highlighting not only the contributions of obscure but key precursors like Hardrock Gunter and Sam Theard but also the influence of celebrity performers like Gene Autry and Ella Fitzgerald. Too often, rock historians treat the genesis of rock 'n' roll as a bolt from the blue, an overnight revolution provoked by the bland pop music that immediately preceded it and created through the white appropriation of music till then played only by and for black audiences. In Before Elvis, Birnbaum daringly argues a more complicated history of rock's evolution from a heady mix of ragtime, boogie-woogie, swing, country music, mainstream pop, and rhythm-and-blues--a melange that influenced one another along the way, from the absorption of blues and boogies into jazz and pop to the integration of country and Caribbean music into rhythm-and-blues. Written in an easy style, Before Elvis presents a bold argument about rock's origins and required reading for fans and scholars of rock 'n' roll history.
Arthur Sullivan is best known as W. S. Gilbert's collaborator in the Savoy Operas. Sullivan was regarded as the nation's leading composer of sacred oratorios on a par with Mendelssohn and Brahms. Ian Bradley provides the first detailed, comprehensive, critical study and review of Sullivan's church and sacred music.
This book studies the ways Hardy writes about music, and argues that this focus allows for a close and varied investigation of the affective dimensions of his poetry and fiction, and his recurrent preoccupations with time, community and love. Throughout his work Hardy associates music with moments of individual expression and relatedness. For him, music provokes a response to life that is inseparable from what gives life value, as well as being incompatible with his increasingly conscious vision of personal and social limitation. The first two chapters trace how this ironic disjunction is evident in the novels and the tales, while exploring in detail how they represent and evoke the spiritual and emotional transports of musical experience. In a corresponding way, the third and fourth chapters concentrate on how, within the poetry, music works as a vehicle of inspiration and memory, recurrently surprising the conscious self with intimations of other potentials of expression. In the fifth chapter, the focus falls on Hardy's own philosophical reading, and thus on his notebooks and letters, so as to revisit in an altered context many of the issues that have been opened up by the book's emphasis on his literary representations of musical experience-issues of individuality, of unconscious and bodily experience, of literary language. Finally, although the book does incorporate some biographical detail about Thomas Hardy's lifelong passion for playing and collecting music, it predominantly works through close reading, while also drawing at points on literary theoretical texts, where these offer ways of articulating the broad questions of literary convention and representation that arise.
This book takes a radical approach to the study of traditional songs. Folk song scholarship was originally obsessed with notions of completeness and narrative coherence; even now long narratives hold a privileged place in most folk song canons. Yet field notebooks and recordings (and, increasingly, publications) overwhelmingly suggest that apparently 'broken' and drastically shortened versions are not perceived as incomplete by those who sing them. Dealing with a wide range of traditions and languages, this study turns the focus on these 'dog-ends' of oral tradition, and looks closely at how very short texts convey meaning in performance by working the audience's knowledge of a highly allusive idiom. What emerges is the tenacity of meaning in the connotative and metaphorical language of traditional song, and the extraordinary adaptability of songs in different cultural contexts. Such pieces have a strong metonymic force: they should not be seen as residual 'last leaves' of a once-complete tradition, but as dynamic elements in the process of oral transmission. Not all song fragments remain in their natural environment, and this book also explores relocations and dislocations as songs are adapted to new contexts: a ballad of love and death is used to count pins in lace-making, song-snippets trail subversive meanings in the novels of Charles Dickens. Because they are variable and elusive to dating, songs have had little attention from the literary establishment: the authors show both how certain critical approaches can be fruitfully applied to song texts, and how concepts from studies in oral traditions prefigure aspects of contemporary critical theory. Like the songs themselves, this book crosses and recrosses the perceived divide between the literary and the oral. Coverage includes English, Welsh, Breton, American, and Finnish songs.
The humble ballad, defined in 1728 as "a song commonly sung up and down the streets," was widely used in elite literature in the eighteenth century and beyond. Authors ranging from John Gay to William Blake to Felicia Hemans incorporated the seemingly incongruous genre of the ballad into their work. Ballads were central to the Scottish Enlightenment's theorization of culture and nationality, to Shakespeare's canonization in the eighteenth century, and to the New Criticism's most influential work, Understanding Poetry. Just how and why did the ballad appeal to so many authors from the Restoration period to the end of the Romantic era and into the twentieth century? Exploring the widespread breach of the wall that separated "high" and "low," Steve Newman challenges our current understanding of lyric poetry. He shows how the lesser lyric of the ballad changed lyric poetry as a whole and, in so doing, helped to transform literature from polite writing in general into the body of imaginative writing that became known as the English literary canon. For Newman, the ballad's early lack of prestige actually increased its value for elite authors after 1660. Easily circulated and understood, ballads moved literature away from the exclusive domain of the courtly, while keeping it rooted in English history and culture. Indeed, elite authors felt freer to rewrite and reshape the common speech of the ballad. Newman also shows how the ballad allowed authors to access the "common" speech of the public sphere, while avoiding what they perceived as the unpalatable qualities of that same public's increasingly avaricious commercial society.
An in-depth study of the nineteenth-century London ballad-singer, a central figure in British cultural, social and political life.