What were the forces that brought Carmen to the Operatic stage? There were certainly many: for example, the liberation of Spain from the Napoleonic rule in 1813; the subsequent emigration of Spanish artists and musicians to form an active community in Paris; the mid-century mush…
This long-awaited study of the life and music of Anglo-Irish composer Ernest John Moeran (1894-1950) finally provides a full biography of the last senior figure in early twentieth-century British Music to have been without one. Although Moeran's work was widely performed during …
From early masterpieces such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and Metropolis (1927) to the post-1945 films of Fassbinder, Herzog, and Wenders, German film constitutes a crucial part of the history of world cinema. It helped to shape Hollywood cinema and had a major impact o…
First comprehensive examination of the ways in which printers, publishers and booksellers adapted and rewrote Arthurian romance in early modern France, for new audiences and in new forms.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) is recognized the world over as a composer of musical masterpieces exhibiting heroic strength, particularly in the face of his increasing deafness from ca. 1798. By 1818, the Viennese composer had begun carrying blank booklets with him, for his a…
Actor and director Paul Wegener released his 1920 silent film The Golem, How He Came into the World in the aftermath of Germany's defeat in World War I. The film's innovative cinematography, lighting effects, modernist architectural design, and thrilling plot all led contemporan…
King John has been perceived as one of England's most notorious monarchs. Medieval writers and later historians condemn him as a tyrant, seeing his long-running dispute with the church as evidence of a king who showed little regard for his faith. This book takes issue with ortho…
Werner Herzog (b. 1942) is perhaps the most famous living German filmmaker, but his films have never been read in the context of German cultural history. And while there is a surfeit of film reviews, interviews, and scholarly articles on Herzog and his work, there are very few b…
The successful sale and distribution of music has always depended on both a physical and a social infrastructure. Though the existence of that infrastructure may be clear, its organization and participants are among the least preserved and thus least understood elements of histo…
The rich contemporary literature of travel has been the focus of numerous recent publications in English that seek to understand how travel narratives, with their distinctive representations of identities, places, and cultures, respond to today's globalized, high-speed world cha…
by Thomson, Rodney M., Winkler, Emily A., Dolmans, Emily
In the past William of Malmesbury (1090-1143) has been seen as first and foremost a historian of England, and little else. This volume reveals not only William's real greatness as a historian and his European vision, but also the breadth and depth of his learning across a number…
The precedent of empire and the promise of return lay at the heart of King Arthur's appeal in the Middle Ages. Both ideas found fullness of expression in the twelfth century: monarchs and magnates sought to recreate an Arthurian golden age that was as wondrous as the biblical an…
The precedent of empire and the promise of return lay at the heart of King Arthur's appeal in the Middle Ages. Both ideas found fullness of expression in the twelfth century: monarchs and magnates sought to recreate an Arthurian golden age that was as wondrous as the biblical an…
Literary texts complicate our understanding of medieval emotions; they not only represent characters experiencing emotion and reaction emotionally to the behaviour of others within the text, but also evoke and play upon emotion in the audiences which heard these texts performed …
Medieval romance narratives glitter with the material objects that were valued and exchanged in late-medieval society: lovers' rings and warriors' swords, holy relics and desirable or corrupted bodies. Romance, however, is also a genre in which such objects make meaning on numer…
By the 1840s Joseph Haydn, who died in 1809 as the most celebrated composer of his generation, had degenerated into the bewigged "Papa Haydn," a shallow placeholder in music history who merely invented the forms used by Beethoven. In a remarkable reversal, Haydn swiftly regained…
