America in the French Imaginary, 1789-1914

America in the French Imaginary, 1789-1914
Author: Diana R. Hallman
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 410
Release: 2022-05-17
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1783277009

Following the American Revolution, French observers often viewed the United States as a laboratory for the forging of new practices of liberté and égalité, in affinity with and divergence from France's own Revolutionary ideals and experiences. The volume examines French views through musical/theatrical portrayals of the American Revolution and Republic, soundscapes of the Statue of Liberty, and homages to the glorified figures of Washington, Franklin and Lafayette. Essays investigate paradoxical depictions of slavery in the United States and French Caribbean colonies of 'Amérique'. French critiques of American music and musicians, including the reception of Americanized or Creolized adaptations of European art traditions as well as American popular music and dance, are also presented. The subject of race features prominently in French interpretations of American music and identity. These interpretations see French constructions of the Indigenous American and African American "exotic" that intersect with tropes of noble, pastoral savagery, menacing barbarism, and the "civilizing" potency of French culture. The French reinterpretation of African American music and dance reveals both a revulsion of Black alterity and an attraction to the expressive freedom, and even subversiveness, of these "foreign" forms of music and dance. Contributions include essays by music, dance, theatre and opera scholars, and the volume will be essential reading for students and scholars of these disciplines.

America's French Orphans

America's French Orphans
Author: Emmanuel Destenay
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2024-06-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1009517899

An exploration of how Americans evaded neutrality by sponsoring 300,000 children of France's war dead between 1914 and 1921.

Music, Nature and Divine Knowledge in England, 1650-1750

Music, Nature and Divine Knowledge in England, 1650-1750
Author: Tom Dixon
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 366
Release: 2023-05-16
Genre:
ISBN: 178327767X

During a period of tumultuous change in English political, religious and cultural life, music signified the unspeakable presence of the divine in the world for many. What was the role of music in the early modern subject's sensory experience of divinity? While the English intellectuals Peter Sterry (1613-72), Richard Roach (1662-1730), William Stukeley (1687-1765) and David Hartley (1705-57), have not been remembered for their 'musicking', this book explores how the musical reflections of these individuals expressed alternative and often uncustomary conceptions of God, the world, and the human psyche. Music is always potentially present in their discourse, emerging as a crucial form of mediation between states: exoteric and esoteric, material and spiritual, outer and inner, public and private, rational and mystical. Dixon shows how Sterry, Roach, Stukeley and Hartley's shared belief in truly universal salvation was articulated through a language of music, implying a feminising influence that set these male individuals apart from contemporaries who often strictly emphasised the rational-i.e. the supposedly masculine-aspects of religion. Musical discourse, instead, provided a link to a spiritual plane that brought these intellectuals closer to 'ultimate reality'. Theirs was a discourse firmly rooted in the real existence of contemporary musical practices, both in terms of the forms and styles implied in the writings under discussion and the physical circumstances in which these musical genres were created and performed. Through exploring ways in which the idea of music was employed in written transmission of elite ideas, this book challenges conventional classifications of a seventeenth-century 'Scientific Revolution' and an eighteenth-century 'Enlightenment', defending an alternative narrative of continuity and change across a number of scholarly disciplines, from seventeenth-century English intellectual history and theology, to musicology and the social history of music.

Five Ballets from Paris and St. Petersburg

Five Ballets from Paris and St. Petersburg
Author: Doug Fullington
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 889
Release: 2024-03-26
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0190944501

This book offers something entirely new: detailed scene-by-scene descriptions of the action and dancing of Giselle, Paquita, Le Corsaire, La Bayadère, and Raymonda, bringing the reader far closer to what the audience saw when the curtain went up on these five classic story ballets than has heretofore been possible. Drawing on archival documents, the authors show that these ballets were like today's pop entertainment: funnier, more violent, more spectacular, and with female characters far stronger than one might expect. This rigorously researched book fills huge gaps in dance history and is bound to be of interest to practitioners, scholars, and devotees of ballet and the arts.

France and Women, 1789-1914

France and Women, 1789-1914
Author: James McMillan
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2002-01-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 1134589581

France and Women, 1789-1914 is the first book to offer an authoritative account of women's history throughout the nineteenth century. James McMillan, author of the seminal work Housewife or Harlot, offers a major reinterpretation of the French past in relation to gender throughout these tumultuous decades of revolution and war. This book provides a challenging discussion of the factors which made French political culture so profoundly sexist and in particular, it shows that many of the myths about progress and emancipation associated with modernisation and the coming of mass politics do not stand up to close scrutiny. It also reveals the conservative nature of the republican left and of the ingrained belief throughout french society that women should remain within the domestic sphere. James McMillan considers the role played by French men and women in the politics, culture and society of their country throughout the 1800s.

The People's Revolution of 1789

The People's Revolution of 1789
Author: Micah Alpaugh
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2024-09-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501776622

The People's Revolution of 1789 analyzes the historic events that unleashed a vast panoply of anarchic, destructive, and creative disorders that demolished France's Old Regime and founded a new revolutionary order. It captures the complex and dynamic interplay of uprisings, elections, meetings, and revolutionary moments that helped create modern freedom. The People's Revolution of 1789 is the first book to chronicle the Parisian, provincial, and colonial movements of 1789 together. In doing so, Micah Alpaugh builds from hundreds of local and regional studies and sources on the French Revolution to provide a new interpretation of the powerful contestations that created the modern revolutionary tradition. He explores the multiplicity of movements—anarchistically operating without a common leader and usually in only loose coordination—that gave the revolutionary dynamic its power, without which the legislators' revolution at Versailles would have failed or been severely curtailed. The rapid onslaught of protests across the First Year of Liberty compounded their effects, overpowering authorities' efforts to maintain a degenerating order and forcing the establishment of a more open system. The People's Revolution of 1789 reveals in new ways how the French revolutionaries ended feudalism, established human rights, abolished the police, and instituted new elected governments. By returning emphasis to the people's revolution, we can better understand how world history's most consequential revolution developed, as millions of French people embraced direct action in hopes of fundamental change. Through the movements of millions, the French created the most powerful revolution the world had yet experienced.

Performing Propaganda

Performing Propaganda
Author: Rachel Moore
Publisher: Music in Society and Culture
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2018
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9781783271887

In the First World War, civilian life played a fundamental part in the war effort; and music was no exception.

This Thing Called the World

This Thing Called the World
Author: Debjani Ganguly
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2016-07-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0822374242

In This Thing Called the World Debjani Ganguly theorizes the contemporary global novel and the social and historical conditions that shaped it. Ganguly contends that global literature coalesced into its current form in 1989, an event marked by the convergence of three major trends: the consolidation of the information age, the arrival of a perpetual state of global war, and the expanding focus on humanitarianism. Ganguly analyzes a trove of novels from authors including Salman Rushdie, Don DeLillo, Michael Ondaatje, and Art Spiegelman, who address wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Sri Lanka, the Palestinian and Kashmiri crises, the Rwandan genocide, and post9/11 terrorism. These novels exist in a context in which suffering's presence in everyday life is mediated through digital images and where authors integrate visual forms into their storytelling. In showing how the evolution of the contemporary global novel is analogous to the European novel’s emergence in the eighteenth century, when society and the development of capitalism faced similar monumental ruptures, Ganguly provides both a theory of the contemporary moment and a reminder of the novel's power.