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Reading Texts in Music and Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century

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This collection offers students a practical guide to understanding the ways music and literature intersect and the influence of each on the other, as well as developing methods of study.This is the...
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  • 10 June 2025
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This collection offers students a practical guide to understanding the ways music and literature intersect and the influence of each on the other, as well as developing methods of study.


This is the first coursebook to help students explore the many types of relationship that exist between music and literature when studied in historical or aesthetic contexts. It fosters interdisciplinary study among students in these subject areas and helps to break down the barrier of music as seeming "impenetrable" to students outside musicology. Chapters each discuss music/text relationships via an important social, aesthetic or cultural theme that maps onto key preoccupations of the long nineteenth century.

Each chapter presents a case-study text first, followed by a short summary that sets out the challenges of approach and interpretation involved. A section on background then places the featured case-study in historical or aesthetic context, leading to a detailed discussion. The book offers a learning experience combining the methodological in music/text relationships with the substantive or thematic.

Contributors: Charlotte Bentley, Philip Burnett, Alisa Clapp-Itnyre, Elicia Clements, Jeremy Coleman, Sarah Collins, Katharine Ellis, Daniel M. Grimley, Elizabeth Helsinger, Fraser Riddell, Emma Sutton, Shafquat Towheed, Phyllis Weliver, Christopher Wiley
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Price: $120.00
Pages: 218
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Inc.
Imprint: Boydell Press
Publication Date: 10 June 2025
Trim Size: 9.21 X 6.14 in
ISBN: 9781837651832
Format: Hardcover
BISACs: MUSIC / History & Criticism, Theory of music and musicology, LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, LITERARY CRITICISM / European / General, HISTORY / Modern / 19th Century, Literature: history and criticism, Comparative literature
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Accessible interdisciplinary models in an enjoyable book, tailored distinctively to a student readership - Michael Allis, Professor of Musicology, University of Leeds
Introduction: A Guide to this Book - Phyllis Weliver and Katharine Ellis

1. Vernon Lee's "A Wicked Voice" (1890): Music and Queerness in Decadent Fiction - Fraser Riddell
2. Conjuring Folk Music: George Sand's The Master Pipers (1853) - Katharine Ellis
3. Bands of Mercy Music: A Cultural Study of Victorian Animal Welfare Songs for Children - Alisa Clapp-Itnyre
4. The Music of the Women's Suffrage Movement - Christopher Wiley
5. Song and the Political Body: William Morris - Elizabeth Helsinger
6. Understanding Colonial Mission Hymns and Hybridity - Philip Burnett
7. Representing Non-Western Music: Robert Louis Stevenson in Kiribati - Emma Sutton
8. Musical Encounters at the Louisiana Lakeside in Charles Jobey's "Le lac Cathahoula" (1856/1861) - Charlotte Bentley
9 Critical Dislocations: Champfleury's Richard Wagner (1860) - Jeremy Coleman
10. Locating Elgar: Nationalism, Landscape and Musical Biography - Daniel M. Grimley
11. Musical Ekphrasis and Intermedial Form in Walter Pater's "Duke Carl of Rosenmold" (1887) - Elicia Clements
12. Women, Music and Tennyson's The Princess (1850 edn) - Phyllis Weliver
13. Reading Whitman, Hearing Vaughan Williams: Sexuality, National Politics and the Role of the Artist in Society - Sarah Collins

Coda - Shafquat Towheed

Index