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This Handbook illustrates the many ways that progressive rock and metal music forge striking engagements with literary texts and themes.The authors and their objects of analytic inquiry offer global and diverse perspectives on these genres and their literary connections: from ancient times to the modern world, from children's literature to epic poetry, from mythology to science fiction, and from esoteric fantasy to harsh political criticism. The musical treatments of these literary materials span the continents from South and North America through Europe and Asia. The collection presents critical perspectives on the enduring and complex relationships between words and music as these are expressed in progressive rock and metal.The book is aimed primarily at an academic market, valuable for second- through final-year students on undergraduate courses devoted to both popular music and to literary studies, and to postgraduate programs and researchers in a range of fields, including popular music studies, musicology, creative music performance and composition, songwriting, literary studies, narrative studies, folklore studies, science fiction studies, cultural studies, liberal studies, and sociology, and for media and history courses that have an interest in the intersection of narratives, music, and society.

Vorwort – C. Wiener: Vom Dichter, der nicht vertont sein wollte. Rückerts poetisches Selbstverständnis und Tendenzen der Rezeption seines Werks – H.-J. Hinrichsen: Das nicht vollendete Schöne. Mahler und Rückert – C. Maurer Zenck: Die Dramaturgie der Rückert-Lieder – I. Rentsch: Gefangene Klanggeister. Mahlers Kindertotenlieder - eine musikalische Übersetzung von Rückerts Lyrik – E. W. Partsch: „Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen“. Zu Mahlers sublimer Inszenierung eines Rückzugs – F. Geiger: Lyrik und Orchester in Mahlers Liedern nach Rückert – A. Stollberg: Das Lied in der Symphonie - oder: Mahlers „neuer Weg“ mit Rückert – C. Hilz: Über das Verhältnis von Text und Klang. Einige Gedanken zur Interpretation von Mahlers Rückert-Liedern aus der Sicht des Sängers und Gesangspädagogen – H. Hein: Diskographie: Mahlers Rückert-Lieder auf Tonträgern

Offers a major new contribution to understanding Schubert's creative approach and the gothic imagination more generally.This book illuminates Franz Schubert's engagement with gothic discourse at the intersection of music, literature and the visual arts. Ideas of the gothic provide a framework for contextualizing the myriad ways in which Schubert's music evokes the blurring of past and present, life and death, and for situating strangeness in relation to a cross-disciplinary phenomenon that captivated the imagination of the time.The study traces the gothic from Schubert's early songs, where its presence is well established, to the instrumental music of his final years. These dialogues speak to shifting associations across chronological boundaries; their traces undergo change, returning in altered contexts - from fleeting disturbances, a rhythmic shudder or a tremolo figuration, to prolonged outbursts and disjuncture. The gothic is at times linked explicitly to death, as in Schubert's graveyard settings, and at other times implied through doubles and distortion, nocturnal imagery, or hybridity and metamorphosis.The Gothic Imagination in the Music of Franz Schubert offers new interpretations, grounded in close reading of musical and poetic material, that move beyond the ghostly and macabre towards a world wherein death, the sublime and grotesquerie are intricately entwined. The book therefore provides for a major new contribution to understanding Schubert's creative approach and the gothic imagination more generally.

A devout Catholic, a visionary—and some say prophetic—writer, Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964) has gained a growing presence in contemporary popular culture. While O'Connor professed that she did not have an ear for music, allusions to her writing appear in the lyrics and narrative form of some of the most celebrated musicians on the contemporary music scene. Flannery at the Grammys sounds the extensive influence of this southern author on the art and vision of a suite of American and British singer-songwriters and pop groups. Author Irwin H. Streight invites critical awareness of O'Connor's resonance in the products of popular music culture—in folk, blues, rock, gospel, punk, heavy metal, and indie pop songs by some of the most notable figures in the popular music business. Streight examines O'Connor's influence on the art and vision of multiple Grammy Award winners Bruce Springsteen, Lucinda Williams, R.E.M., and U2, along with celebrated songwriters Nick Cave, PJ Harvey, Sufjan Stevens, Mary Gauthier, Tom Waits, and others. Despite her orthodox religious, and at times controversial, views and limited literary output, O'Connor has left a curiously indelible mark on the careers of the successful musicians discussed in this volume. Still, her acknowledged influence and remarkable presence in contemporary pop and rock songs has not been well noted by pop music critics and/or literary scholars. Many years in the making, Flannery at the Grammys achieves groundbreaking work in cultural studies and combines in-depth literary and pop music scholarship to engage the informed devotee and the casual reader alike.

«This volume locates itself neatly in the growing collection of publications on intermediality by relating such practices to Roland Barthes. Barthesian motifs and writerly concerns are found within a variety of intermedial practices, as the analysis moves, historically and globally, across visual, aural and literary cultures. Such an approach is both appropriate and innovative within Barthes Studies and in cultural theory more generally.» (Andy Stafford, Professor of French and Critical Theory, University of Leeds) The essays in this collection reconsider Roland Barthes as a crucial figure in intermedia studies, arguing that the concepts and forms of analysis he pioneered are of continuing importance for students and scholars working in the field. These essays utilize an interdisciplinary methodology, drawing on Barthes's own intermedial critical practice, to examine the multiple relationships between art, literature, music and performance and across different languages. The collection places Barthes's writing in critical dialogue with other theorists, including Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Dick Higgins and Emmanuel Levinas, investigating the work of figures as varied as André Breton, Giordano Bruno, Alain Cavalier, Alfred Hitchcock, Marcel Schwob, W. G. Sebald, Steven Spielberg, Yoko Tawada and Lev Tolstoy. The collection demonstrates that Barthes's intermedial critical and theoretical practice provides a means of challenging fixed critical narratives and exploring crucial intermedial issues, including how narrative crosses media, the close relationship between image and text throughout history, and how twentieth-century consumer capitalist culture transformed the relationship between image and text.

Both Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald grew up in the Midwest and were strongly influenced by Romantic music, anchored by the aesthetic tastes of the German immigrants who settled across that region. Hemingway's ear for form and Fitzgerald's penchant for lyricism stem from early and frequent exposure to such masters as Johannes Brahms and Franz Schubert. Nostalgia is typically associated with romanticism, and the acoustic longing found in Hemingway and Fitzgerald's fiction resonates with it, characterized in the narrative voices in Hemingway's Winner Take Nothing, Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night, and other of their fiction from the early thirties. Understanding that each writer has his own kind of musical biography charts new ways to read material we already think we know. Reading their work within a musico-historical context means acknowledging it as an extension of the 19th century; it means reading them as Romantic Modernists. This work reads each author's prose musically, considering how Romantic music inspired their craft and distinguished their work through the pivotal juncture of the early to mid-1930s, when each man faced an artistic crisis of conscience. Initial chapters provide background information in music history. Following chapters focus on how the life of each author was shaped by music and how they worked with specific influences that grew out of steady interactions with it, evidence of which is found in archival documents and collections.

Taylor Swift, arguably the most prolific and acclaimed singer-songwriter of the 21st century, has shaped her listeners'collective consciousness and challenged her industry's often limiting attitudes toward genre, revision, and collaboration. Although Swift is a perennial subject in the media, cast in both a positive and a negative light, few professional scholars have considered her ever-growing body of work. The Literary Taylor Swift examines Swift's significance and timeliness through literary analysis and theory. Taylor Swift has been celebrated for her ability to craft immersive narratives and to articulate, with lyrical acuity, a broad range of emotional experiences, and her lyrics underscore her profound relationship with text. The Literary Taylor Swift explores Swift's engagements, intertextual and otherwise, with literature and treats her songs as literature-as, that is, stories, poems, and other textual forms to which literary-critical theories and methodologies can and should be productively applied. This collection offers carefully curated arguments constellated around four key relationships: Swift and the literary-historical canon; Swift and the language of gender and sexuality; Swift and the relationship between writing and memory; and Swift and the nature of literary craft.

As a work of musical theory, or meta-theory, Music's Making draws extensively on work done in philosophy and literary criticism in addition to the scholarship of musicologists and music theorists. Music's Making is divided into two large parts. The first half develops global attitudes toward music: emergence out of self and hearing through (drawing on Kabbalah and other sources), middle-voice (as discussed in philosophical phenomenology), liminal space (as discussed in literary theory), an ethics of intersubjectivity (drawing on Levinas), and character, canon, and metaleptic transformations (drawing chiefly on Harold Bloom). The second half embodies a search for metaphors, figurative language toward understanding music's endlessly variegated shaping of time-space. The musicians and scholars who inform this part of the book include Pierre Boulez, Gilles Deleuze, Anton Webern, Morton Feldman, and James Dillon. The book closes with an extended inquiry into the metaphors of horizontal and vertical experience and the spiritual qualities of musical experience expressed through those metaphors.

Jazz and Literature: An Introduction presents an original collection of essays from leading international scholars, examining an array of musical and literary interconnections including improvisation, multicultural influences, poetry, modernism, the Beat movement, jazz forms, noir, solo and collective expression, global perspectives on jazz and literature, etc. This volume sheds light on the critical and creative discussions of music and literature, showing the evolving relevance of jazz in the twenty-first century. The book also includes a special section dedicated to interviews with writers, musicians, and creatives such as U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón, Jericho Brown, Anthony Joseph, Geoff Dyer, Paul Hirsch, Dickie Landry, and Dwandalyn R. Reece. This volume is an ideal resource for students of music and literature and for academics interested in the creative dialogues between jazz and literature.

From a Robert Frost poem on her debut album to the myth of Cassandra on The Tortured Poets Department, Taylor Swift's lyrics are filled with literary connections.Make sure you're catching them all with this expert guide to the novels, poems, and plays that influence her songwriting.Let a literature professor and a musical theater artist guide you through the Taylor Swift canon—from Shakespeare to the Brontë sisters to Daphne du Maurier! Learn what'New Romantics'has to do with the old RomanticsGet to know the Gothic monsters haunting MidnightsSpot Taylor's many Great Gatsby referencesDiscover what Taylor Swift and Emily Dickinson have in commonAnd find your new favorite tortured poet!Packed with fun facts, entertaining analysis, and literary-themed playlists that fans will love, Taylor Swift by the Book will turn anyone from a Taylor Swift lover into a Taylor Swift scholar.With full-color illustrations highlighting the literary eras of Dr. Swift (yes, she has an honorary PhD), it's a perfect gift for the Swiftie in your life.

Featuring 28 music examples this book takes an innovative approach to analyzing and interpreting nineteenth-century German song, offering new perspectives on Robert Schumann's Lieder and song cycles.Robert Schumann's Lieder are some of the richest and most complex songs in the repertoire and have long raised questions and stimulated discussion among scholars, performers, and listeners. While a wide range of methodologies has been used to understand and interpret his songs, one that has been conspicuously absent is an approach based on narratology (the theory and study of narrative texts).Proceeding from the premise that the performance of a Lied is a narrative act, in which the singer and pianist together function as a narrator, Andrew Weaver's groundbreaking study proposes a comprehensive theory of narratology for the German Romantic Lied and song cycle, using Schumann's complete song oeuvre as the test case. The theory, grounded in the work of narratologist Mieke Bal but also drawing upon recent work in literary theory and musicology, illuminates how music can open up new meanings for the poem, as well as how a narratological analysis of the poem can help us understand the music.Weaver's book offers new insights into Schumann's Lieder and the poetry he set while simultaneously proposing a methodology applicable to the analysis and interpretation of a wide range of works, including not only the rich treasury of German Lieder but also potentially any genre of accompanied song in any language from the Middle Ages to the present day.

Many metal songs incorporate poetry into their lyrics using a broad array of techniques, both textual and musical. This book develops a novel adaptation, appropriation, and quotation taxonomy that both expands our knowledge of how poetry is used in metal music and is useful for scholars across adaptation studies broadly. The text follows both a quantitative and a qualitative approach. It identifies 384 metal songs by 224 bands with intertextual ties to 146 poems written by fifty-one different poets, with a special focus on Edgar Allan Poe, John Milton's Paradise Lost and the work of WWI's War Poets. This analysis of transformational mechanisms allows poetry to find an afterlife in the form of metal songs and sheds light on both the adaptation and appropriation process and on the semantic shifts occasioned by the recontextualisation of the poems into the metal music culture. Some musicians reuse – and sometimes amplify – old verses related to politics and religion inour present times; others engage in criticism or simple contradiction. In some cases, the bands turn the abstract feelings evoked by the poems into concrete personal experiences. The most adventurous recraft the original verses by changing the point of view of either the poetic voice or the addressed actors, altering the vocaliser of the narrative or the gender of the protagonists. These mechanisms help metal musicians make the poems their own and adjust them to their artistic needs so that the resulting product is consistent with the expectations of the metal music culture.

Die Chöre der antiken Tragödie, die Sequenzen im christlichen Mittelalter, die Lieder der Troubadours und die Englischen Balladen – Text und Musik spielen zusammen, heißt doch carmen Lied und Zauberspruch. Mit vielen Textbeispielen in Original und Übersetzung folgt die Darstellung der wechselvollen Dominanz von Ton und Wort bis zu Thomas Manns Doktor Faustus und Hofmannsthals/Strauss'bzw. Brechts/Weills Zusammenarbeit.

Monografie Kapitoly z filosofie nové hudby se věnuje některým podobám interakce mezi hudbou, filosofií, literaturou a filmem v průběhu 20. století. Zaměřuje se především na způsob, jakým byla v literatuře a filosofii reflektována tzv. schönbergovská reforma vedoucí ke zrušení tonálního systému. Druhou podstatnou proměnou, jíž hudební jazyk v průběhu minulého století prošel a jež se stala předmětem pozoruhodných teoretických reflexí, je rovněž rušení rozdílu mezi (hudebním) zvukem a (přírodním) hlukem, jak k němu docházelo např. v konkrétní hudbě. Mezi autory, kteří se stávají předmětem zájmu Fulkovy knihy, patří Claude Lévi-Strauss, Theodor W. Adorno, Michel Foucault, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann či Alain Robbe-Grillet. Přestože neusiluje o vyčerpávající přehled různých podob, jakých zmiňovaná interakce nabývá, v reprezentativní podobě ukazuje rozmanitost a bohatost různých způsobů teoretického uvažování o problematice „nové hudby“.

Just as soon as it had got rolling, rock music had a problem: it wanted to be art. A mere four years separate the Beatles as mere kiddy culture from the artful geniuses of Sergeant Pepper's, meaning the very same band who represents the mass-consumed,'mindless'music of adolescents simultaneously enjoys status as among the best that Western culture has to offer. The story of rock music, it turns out, is less that of a contagious popular form situated in opposition to high art, but, rather, a story of high and low in dialogue--messy and contentious, to be sure, but also mutually obligated to account for, if not appropriate, one another. The chapters in this book track the uses of literature, specifically, within this relation, helping to showcase collectively its fundamental role in the emergence of the'pop omnivore.'

From her unique standpoint as singer-songwriter-scholar, Polly Paulusma examines the influences of Carter's 1960s folk singing, unknown until now, on her prose writing. Recent critical attention has focused on Carter's relationship with folk/fairy tales, but this book uses a newly available archive containing Carter's folk song notes, books, LPs and recordings to change the debate, proving Carter performed folk songs. Placing this archive alongside the album sleeve notes Carter wrote and her diaries and essays, it reimagines Carter's prose as a vehicle for the singing voice, and reveals a writing style imbued with'songfulness'informed by her singing praxis.Reading Carter's texts through songs she knew and sang, this book shows, from influences of rhythm, melodic shape, thematic focus, imagery,'voice'and'breath', how Carter steeped her writing with folk song's features to produce'canorography': song-infused prose. Concluding with a discussion of Carter's profound influence on songwriters, focusing on the author's interview with Emily Portman, this book invites us to reimagine Carter's prose as audial event, dissolving boundaries between prose and song, between text and reader, between word and sound, in an ever-renewing act of sympathetic resonance.

Women in Rock, Women in Romanticism is the first book-length work to explore the interrelationships between contemporary female musicians and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art, music, and literature by women and men. The music and videos of contemporary musicians including Erykah Badu, Beyoncé, The Carters, Hélène Cixous, Missy Elliot, the Indigo Girls, Janet Jackson, Janis Joplin (and Big Brother and the Holding Company), Natalie Merchant, Joni Mitchell, Janelle Monáe, Alanis Morrisette, Siouxsie Sioux, Patti Smith, St. Vincent (Annie Clark), and Alice Walker are explored through the lenses of pastoral and Afropresentism, Gothic, female Gothic, and the literature of William Blake, Beethoven, Arthur Schopenhauer, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charlotte Dacre, Ralph Waldo Emerson, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Ann Radcliffe, William Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, her husband Percy Shelley, Henry David Thoreau, Horace Walpole, Jane Williams, Mary Wollstonecraft, and William Wordsworth to explore how each sheds light on the other, and how women have appropriated, responded to, and been inspired by the work of authors from previous centuries.

‘Retro'is not only a pervading phenomenon in today's Western culture but has informed cultural history for some centuries and thus gives momentousness to the subject of the present volume, namely literary texts and musical compositions which, for various reasons and with multiple functions, ‘make it old'.

Winner, 2023 Columbia University Press Distinguished Book AwardFinalist, 2023 Pauli Murray Book Prize in Black Intellectual History, African American Intellectual History SocietyShortlisted, Historical Nonfiction Legacy Award, Hurston / Wright FoundationRalph Ellison famously characterized ensemble jazz improvisation as “antagonistic cooperation.” Both collaborative and competitive, musicians play with and against one another to create art and community. In Antagonistic Cooperation, Robert G. O'Meally shows how this idea runs throughout twentieth-century African American culture to provide a new history of Black creativity and aesthetics.From the collages of Romare Bearden and paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat to the fiction of Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison to the music of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, O'Meally explores how the worlds of African American jazz, art, and literature have informed one another. He argues that these artists drew on the improvisatory nature of jazz and the techniques of collage not as a way to depict a fractured or broken sense of Blackness but rather to see the Black self as beautifully layered and complex. They developed a shared set of methods and motives driven by the belief that art must involve a sense of community. O'Meally's readings of these artists and their work emphasize how they have not only contributed to understanding of Black history and culture but also provided hope for fulfilling the broken promises of American democracy.

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Music showcases the latest international research into the captivating and vast subject of the many uses of music in relation to Shakespeare's plays and poems, extending from the Bard's own time to the present day. The coverage is truly global in its scope, with ground-breaking studies of Shakespeare-related music in countries as diverse as China, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Russia, South Africa, Sweden, and the Soviet Union, as well as the Anglophone musical and theatrical traditions of the UK and USA. The range of genres surveyed is equally extensive, embracing music for theatre, opera, ballet, musicals, the concert hall, and film, in addition to Shakespeare's ongoing afterlives in folk music, jazz, and popular music. The authors take a range of diverse approaches in tackling their remits: some chapters investigate the evidence for performative practices in the Early Modern and later eras, while others offer detailed accounts of representative case studies, situating these firmly in their cultural contexts, or reflecting on the fascinating political and sociological ramifications of the music. As a whole, the Handbook provides a unique and impressively wide-ranging compendium of cutting-edge scholarship engaging with an extraordinarily rich body of music.

The Music of the Spheres in the Western Imagination describes various systematic musical ecologies of the cosmos by examining attempts over time to define Western theoretical musical systems, whether practical, human, nonhuman, or celestial. This book focuses on the theoretical, theological, philosophical, physical, and mathematical concepts of a cosmic musical order and how these concepts have changed in order to fit different worldviews through the imaginations of theologians, theorists, and authors of fiction, as well as the practical performance of music. Special attention is given to music theory treatises between the ninth and sixteenth centuries, English-language hymnody from the eighteenth century to the present, polemical works on music and worship from the last hundred years, the Divine Comedy of Dante, nineteenth- and twentieth-century English-language fiction, the fictional works of C. S. Lewis, and the legendarium of J. R. R. Tolkien.

A groundbreaking appreciation of Dylan as a literary practitioner WINNER OF THE ELIZABETH AGEE PRIZE IN AMERICAN LITERATURE The literary establishment tends to regard Bob Dylan as an intriguing, if baffling, outsider. That changed overnight when Dylan was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature, challenging us to think of him as an integral part of our national and international literary heritage. No One to Meet: Imitation and Originality in the Songs of Bob Dylan places Dylan the artist within a long tradition of literary production and offers an innovative way of understanding his unique, and often controversial, methods of composition. In lucid prose, Raphael Falco demonstrates the similarity between what Renaissance writers called imitatio and the way Dylan borrows, digests, and transforms traditional songs. Although Dylan's lyrical postures might suggest a post-Romantic, “avant-garde” consciousness, No One to Meet shows that Dylan's creative process borrows from and creatively expands the methods used by classical and Renaissance authors. Drawing on numerous examples, including Dylan's previously unseen manuscript excerpts and archival materials, Raphael Falco illuminates how the ancient process of poetic imitation, handed down from Greco-Roman antiquity, allows us to make sense of Dylan's musical and lyrical technique. By placing Dylan firmly in the context of an age-old poetic practice, No One to Meet deepens our appreciation of Dylan's songs and allows us to celebrate him as what he truly is: a great writer.

A look beyond the virtuosity of Romanticism's piano superstar.Pianist Paul Roberts recasts Franz Liszt as a composer of poetic feeling rather than just a purveyor of technical brilliance. Reading Franz Liszt: Revealing the Poetry behind the Piano Music immerses readers in Liszt's world through a vivid exploration of his most beloved pieces and the literature that inspired them—from Petrarch's love poetry to the sensibilities of Byron, Sénancour, Goethe, and others. The origins of artistic inspiration can be obscure. However, for Franz Liszt, literary quotations in his scores provide fascinating insights into the sources of his creative imagination, revealing a breadth of reading that inspired some of the greatest piano music of all time.A knowledge of the writers whom Liszt revered and often quoted at length enriches an understanding and appreciation of his music. Roberts shows how Liszt in his pioneering piano works created a new concept of musical expression comparable to the emotional and dramatic power of the opera and novel. This book leads us into the essence of Liszt's poetic world, revealing the relevance of his literary inspiration for today's listeners as well as for performers coming to terms with its expressive demands.

Vertont ein Komponist ein literarisches Werk, dann kann er seine Komposition auf verschiedene Ebenen des Textes hin ausrichten – auf dessen formalpoetischen Bau, die Atmosphäre, den Inhalt, die Metaphorik und andere. Franz Schubert hat sich bei seinen Liedkompositionen vor allem auf den Sprechvorgang konzentriert. Für ihn stand im Mittelpunkt, dass die Musik das gedruckte poetische Wort wieder hörbar werden lässt. Wie das geschieht und welche Wirkungen sich daraus auf Inhalt und Aussage der Dichtung ergeben, zeigt Michael Hoyer an zwölf teils bekannten, teils wenig bekannten Liedern aus Schuberts mittlerer und später Schaffensperiode. Nach eingehender Analyse der dichterischen Vorlage untersucht er jeweils, wie die Komposition die poetischen Vorgaben aufgreift, modifiziert, erweitert oder auch konterkariert. Präzise musikanalytische Angaben zu Singstimme und Begleitung belegen Hoyers Ausführungen und machen sie nachvollziehbar. Die vollständigen Notentexte aller besprochenen Kompositionen sind im Anhang des Buches abgedruckt.

Popular Music and the Poetics of Self in Fiction explores the various links between the self and popular music in contemporary fiction. In the novels discussed in this volume, musical references go far beyond creating a tapestry of sound, they make literary characters come alive by giving an account of the physiological and psychological effects of their musical experiences and of their ways of life in different (sub)cultural and social groups. With plots revolving around songs and albums, musicians and bands, and fans and scenes, the thematic focus on the self encompasses the relation of musical taste and identity construction, popular music's function as a medium of individual and collective memory, and its uses in everyday life across decades, spaces, and genres.

Throughout her fiction, Willa Cather mentioned forty-seven operas. References to opera appear in all but three of her twelve novels and in roughly half of her short stories. Despite a dearth of musical education, Cather produced astute writing about the genre beginning in her earliest criticism and continuing throughout her career. She counted opera stars among her close friends, and according to Edith Lewis, her companion throughout adulthood, the two women frequently visited the theater, even in the early days, when purchasing tickets to attend performances proved a financial sacrifice. Melding cultural history with thoughtful readings of her works and discussions of opera's complex place in turn-of-the-century America, David McKay Powell's Cather and Opera offers the first book-length study of what drew the writer so powerfully and repeatedly to the art form. With close attention to Cather's fiction and criticism, Powell posits that at the heart of both her work and the operatic corpus dwells an innate tension between high artistic ideals and popular acceptance, often figured as a clash between compositional integrity and raw, personal emotion. Considering her connection to opera in both historical and intertextual terms, Cather and Opera investigates what operatic references mean in Cather's writing, along with what the opera represented to her throughout her life.

Wallace Stevens's musicality is so profound that scholars have only begun to grasp his ties to the art of music or the music of his own poetry. In this study, two long-time specialists present a polyphonic composition in which they pursue various interlocking perspectives. Their case studies demonstrate how music as a temporal art form may affect a poetic of ephemerality, sensuous experience, and affective intensification. Such a poetic, they argue, invites flexible interpretations that respond to poetry as an art of textual performance. How did Stevens enact the relation between music and memory? How can we hear his verse as a form of melody-making? What was specific to his ways of recording birdsong? Have we been missing the latent music of Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, and Claude Debussy in particular poems? What were the musical poetics he shared with Igor Stravinsky? And how is our experience of the late poetry transformed when we listen to a musical setting by Ned Rorem? The Poetic Music of Wallace Stevens will appeal to experts in the poet's work, students of Modernism in the arts, and a wider audience fascinated by the dynamics of exchange between music and poetry.