Bücher der Reihe Border Crossings

This collection of original essays thoroughly explores the importance of music in thematic and formal terms, both in Eliot's imaginative and critical work.

The legendary Greek figure Orpheus was said to have possessed magical powers capable of moving all living and inanimate things through the sound of his lyre and voice. Over time, the Orphic theme has come to indicate the power of music to unsettle, subvert, and ultimately bring down oppressive realities in order to liberate the soul and expand human life without limits. The liberating effect of music has been a particularly important theme in twentieth-century African American literature.The nine original essays in Black Orpheus examines the Orphic theme in the fiction of such African American writers as Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, James Baldwin, Nathaniel Mackey, Sherley Anne Williams, Ann Petry, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, Gayl Jones, and Toni Morrison. The authors discussed in this volume depict music as a mystical, shamanistic, and spiritual power that can miraculously transform the realities of the soul and of the world. Here, the musician uses his or her music as a weapon to shield and protect his or her spirituality. Written by scholars of English, music, women¿s studies, American studies, cultural theory, and black and Africana studies, the essays in this interdisciplinary collection ultimately explore the thematic, linguistic structural presence of music in twentieth-century African American fiction.

First Published in 2000. Nearly everyone who addresses T. S. Eliot's imaginative and critical work must acknowledge the importance of music in thematic and formal terms. This collection of original essays thoroughly explores this aspect of his work from a number of perspectives.

Walt Whitman''s poetry, especially his Civil War poetry, attracted settings by a wide variety of modern composers in both English- and German-speaking countries. The essays in this volume trace the transformation of Whitman''s nineteenth-century texts into vehicles for confronting twentieth-century problems-aesthetic, social, and political. The contributors pay careful attention to music and poetry alike in examining how the Whitman settings become exemplary means of dealing with both the tragic and utopian faces of modernism. The book is accompanied by a recording by Joan Heller and Thomas Stumpf of complete Whitman cycles composed by Kurt Weill, George Crumb, and Lawrence Kramer, and the first recording of four Whitman songs composed in the 1920s by Marc Blitzstein.

First Published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Music and Modern Art adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the relationship between these two fields of creative endeavor.

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The original essays in this collection chronicle the transformation of Arnold Schoenberg's works from music as pure art to music as a vehicle of religious and political ideas, during the first half of the twentieth century. This interdisciplinary volume includes contributions from musicologists, music theorists, and scholars of German literature and of Jewish studies.