Les Misérables

Author(s):  
Kathryn M. Grossman ◽  
Bradley Stephens

One of Britain’s most profitable musical exports, Les Misérables has captivated audiences worldwide with its mix of stirring spectacle and high emotion. Critical response has, however, been deeply divided. Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg’s ‘megamusical’ has often been accused of trivializing the mammoth nineteenth-century novel by Victor Hugo on which it is based, reducing Hugo’s epic of social injustice to populist sentimentalism. To challenge the cliché of the inferiority of adaptations and the bias towards ‘high art’ that such criticism generates, this essay specifies the relationship between Hugo’s global bestseller and the world’s longest-running musical. This connection has received much less scholarly attention than the fame of each work would suggest. By exploring their affiliation within the contexts of both Hugo’s Romanticism and the libretto’s collaborative development from Paris to London, a revealing likeness is identified that clearly underpins the success of the ‘show of shows’.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Arini May Loader

<p>This thesis reads Te Rangikaheke's texts through the editorial, Te Arawa and biographic dimensions of the writer and the texts. Te Rangikaheke was a prolific nineteenth century writer who produced over 800 pages of manuscript material. 1 Although he has enjoyed a moderate amount of scholarly attention, this has tended to focus on attribution, cataloguing and tracing publication, transcription and translating, commentary on authenticity and literary quality and his account of history. Specifically, the first core chapter explores issues concerning the editing of Te Rangikaheke's manuscripts by Governor George Grey and the effects of Grey's editing decisions on the texts. This chapter explores the nature of the relationship between Grey and Te Rangikaheke, the effects of this relationship on Te Rangikaheke's texts, and what the dualities of Pakeha/Maori and Governor/Native might mean in terms of the texts. Responding to the calls of American Indian Literary Criticism for studies of Indigenous topics to engage deeply with the contexts of iwi and place, the second core chapter looks at Te Rangikaheke as an Arawa writer and explores issues around identity and articulating an Arawa literary history. Finally, a biography of Te Rangikaheke elaborated from previously known and new biographic details combined with a close reading of his name and three of Te Rangikaheke's letters. Ultimately, it is anticipated that this thesis will forge new pathways into in the study of Wiremu Maihi Te Rangikaheke and his writing, and that these new pathways will clear some much needed space in which a deeper analysis of Te Rangikaheke's writing can be articulated. Furthermore, beyond its focus on a single writer, this thesis extends the scholarship on nineteenth century Maori writing, Maori historical studies, and Maori intellectual history and in this way speaks to a contemporary Indigenous intellectual agenda.</p>


Author(s):  
Julian Horton

Sonata deformation theory constitutes possibly the most substantial recent contribution to the analytical literature dealing with the sonata-type repertoire of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This notion, developed by James Hepokoski in relation to the music of Sibelius and Strauss and subsequently elaborated both collaboratively and separately by Warren Darcy and Hepokoski, posits nineteenth-century practice as a critical response to a theorized, normative model of sonata form. The widespread formal experimentation evident in the instrumental and symphonic repertoire from Chopin to Schoenberg arises, by these terms, from a more-or-less conscious distortion of the normative pattern proposed seminally by Anton Reicha, and consolidated in the Formenlehre abstractions of A. B. Marx and Carl Czerny, which in turn evolved as part of the pedagogical reception of Beethoven. This essay offers a critical appraisal of the extent to which deformation theory affords a satisfactory basis for understanding novel sonata procedures in Bruckner’s symphonies. The formal strategies of these works have proved habitually resistant to unproblematic sonata readings. Persistent accusations of formlessness have often been challenged by the detection of forming processes that cut across the perceived requirements of classical formal archetypes. Yet, pace Darcy’s study of deformational procedures in Bruckner (1997), I contend that this concept gives an inadequate rendition of the symphonies’ sonata forms, misrepresenting the nature of the composer’s didactic experience, the relationship of norm and deviation in the music, and the place the symphonies occupy in the general development of the genre after Beethoven.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Arini May Loader

<p>This thesis reads Te Rangikaheke's texts through the editorial, Te Arawa and biographic dimensions of the writer and the texts. Te Rangikaheke was a prolific nineteenth century writer who produced over 800 pages of manuscript material. 1 Although he has enjoyed a moderate amount of scholarly attention, this has tended to focus on attribution, cataloguing and tracing publication, transcription and translating, commentary on authenticity and literary quality and his account of history. Specifically, the first core chapter explores issues concerning the editing of Te Rangikaheke's manuscripts by Governor George Grey and the effects of Grey's editing decisions on the texts. This chapter explores the nature of the relationship between Grey and Te Rangikaheke, the effects of this relationship on Te Rangikaheke's texts, and what the dualities of Pakeha/Maori and Governor/Native might mean in terms of the texts. Responding to the calls of American Indian Literary Criticism for studies of Indigenous topics to engage deeply with the contexts of iwi and place, the second core chapter looks at Te Rangikaheke as an Arawa writer and explores issues around identity and articulating an Arawa literary history. Finally, a biography of Te Rangikaheke elaborated from previously known and new biographic details combined with a close reading of his name and three of Te Rangikaheke's letters. Ultimately, it is anticipated that this thesis will forge new pathways into in the study of Wiremu Maihi Te Rangikaheke and his writing, and that these new pathways will clear some much needed space in which a deeper analysis of Te Rangikaheke's writing can be articulated. Furthermore, beyond its focus on a single writer, this thesis extends the scholarship on nineteenth century Maori writing, Maori historical studies, and Maori intellectual history and in this way speaks to a contemporary Indigenous intellectual agenda.</p>


2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-216
Author(s):  
Sarah Irving-Stonebraker

Through an examination of the extensive papers, manuscripts and correspondence of American physician Benjamin Rush and his friends, this article argues that it is possible to map a network of Scottish-trained physicians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. These physicians, whose members included Benjamin Rush, John Redman, John Morgan, Adam Kuhn, and others, not only brought the Edinburgh model for medical pedagogy across the Atlantic, but also disseminated Scottish stadial theories of development, which they applied to their study of the natural history and medical practices of Native Americans and slaves. In doing so, these physicians developed theories about the relationship between civilization, historical progress and the practice of medicine. Exploring this network deepens our understanding of the transnational intellectual geography of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century British World. This article develops, in relation to Scotland, a current strand of scholarship that maps the colonial and global contexts of Enlightenment thought.


Romanticism ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-215
Author(s):  
Alex Broadhead

In 2009, Damian Walford Davies called for a counterfactual turn in Romantic studies, a move reflective of a wider growth of critical interest in the relationship between Romanticism and counterfactual historiography. In contrast to these more recent developments, the lives of the Romantics have provided a consistent source of speculation for authors of popular alternate history since the nineteenth century. Yet the aims of alternate history as a genre differ markedly from those of its more scholarly cousin, counterfactual historiography. How, then, might such works fit in to the proposed counterfactual turn? This article makes a case for the critical as well as the creative value of alternate histories featuring the Romantics. By exploring how these narratives differ from works of counterfactual historiography, it seeks to explain why the Romantics continue to inspire authors of alternate history and to illuminate the forking paths that Davies's counterfactual turn might take.


2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-135
Author(s):  
Giles Whiteley

Walter Pater's late-nineteenth-century literary genre of the imaginary portrait has received relatively little critical attention. Conceived of as something of a continuum between his role as an art critic and his fictional pursuits, this essay probes the liminal space of the imaginary portraits, focusing on the role of the parergon, or frame, in his portraits. Guided by Pater's reading of Kant, who distinguishes between the work (ergon) and that which lies outside of the work (the parergon), between inside and outside, and contextualised alongside the analysis of Derrida, who shows how such distinctions have always already deconstructed themselves, I demonstrate a similar operation at work in the portraits. By closely analysing the parerga of two of Pater's portraits, ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’ (1887) and ‘Apollo in Picardy’ (1893), focusing on his partial quotation of Goethe in the former, and his playful autocitation and impersonation of Heine in the latter, I argue that Pater's parerga seek to destabilise the relationship between text and context so that the parerga do not lie outside the text but are implicated throughout in their reading, changing the portraits constitutively. As such, the formal structure of the parergon in Pater's portraits is also a theoretical fulcrum in his aesthetic criticism and marks that space where the limits of, and distinctions between, art and life become blurred.


Romantisme ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 36 (134) ◽  
pp. 95-105
Author(s):  
Mario Vargas Llosa
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Elaine Auyoung

The conclusion of this book calls attention to the relationship between comprehending realist fiction and Aristotle’s claim that mimetic representation provides a form of aesthetic pleasure distinct from our response to what is represented. It also argues that, by demonstrating how much nineteenth-century novelists depend on the knowledge and abilities that readers bring to a text, cognitive research on reading helps us revisit long-standing theoretical assumptions in literary studies. Because the felt experience of reading is so distinct from the mental acts underlying it, knowing more about the basic architecture of reading can help literary critics refine their claims about what novels can and cannot do to their readers.


Author(s):  
Ritchie Robertson

Ritchie Robertson situates Lessing’s text within debates over the proper depiction of extreme suffering in art, focusing on Goethe’s essay on the Laocoon group (1798), as well as other late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century works on the representation of pain. The issue of suffering in art was of utmost significance to Goethe’s ideology of the classical, Robertson explains; more than that, the themes introduced in Lessing’s essay—above all, its concerns with how suffering can be depicted in words and images—proved pivotal within Goethe’s prescriptions about the relationship between idealism and individuality (or ‘the characteristic’) in art. As part of a larger campaign against what he called ‘naturalism’ in art, Goethe argued that the ancients did not share the false notion that art must imitate nature. For Goethe, responding to Lessing, the power of the Laocoon group lay precisely in its depiction of bodily suffering as something not just beautiful, but also anmutig (‘sensuously pleasing’).


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