515 research outputs found

    The Long Lives of Old Lutes: The Cultural and Material History of the Veneration of Old Musical Instruments

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    This study examines the object biographies of musical instruments and the function of age in the cultural and material history of the lute. It follows the central question of why old instruments were valued more greatly than new ones and what measures had to be executed to adapt the objects to the ever-changing musical style. It traces the lute in its several cultural functions from the 17th to the 19th century: as a musical instrument, as a symbol, as a commodity, and as an object that had to be adapted, repaired, and altered by several generations of lute makers. This interdisciplinary approach uses a broad spectrum of sources from treatises, lute manuals, forewords in printed lute music, and depictions of lutes in literature, poetry, and visual arts to construct a narrative of the appreciation of old musical instruments. It investigates the material changes that were necessary to ensure their continued use by a profound study of more than 100 instruments in public and private collections. The different business models and prices in the trade of lutes are compared and connected to the common knowledge about old instruments and their brand characteristics among lute players. This study employs methods from musicology, organology, material culture studies, acoustics, economics, art history, technology, and digital humanities. This multivalent approach enhances the understanding of the general dynamics of commodities as status symbols, object biographies, and functional objects and connects them to the material and cultural history of objects using the lute as a case study.Die Studie untersucht die Objektbiografien von Musikinstrumenten und die Funktion des Alters fĂŒr die kulturelle und materielle Geschichte von Lauteninstrumenten. Sie geht der zentralen Frage nach, warum alte Instrumente höher geschĂ€tzt wurden als neue und welche Maßnahmen ergriffen werden mussten, um die Objekte an den sich stĂ€ndig verĂ€ndernden Musikstil anzupassen. Sie verfolgt die Laute in ihren verschiedenen kulturellen Funktionen vom 17. bis zum 19. Jahrhundert: als Musikinstrument, als Symbol, als Gebrauchsgegenstand und als Objekt, das von mehreren Generationen von Lautenbauern angepasst, repariert und verĂ€ndert werden musste. Der interdisziplinĂ€re Ansatz nutzt ein breites Spektrum von Quellen wie Traktate, LautenhandbĂŒcher, Vorworte in gedruckter Lautenmusik und Darstellungen von Lauten in Literatur, Poesie und bildender Kunst, um die Geschichte der WertschĂ€tzung alter Musikinstrumente nachzuverfolgen. Anhand einer eingehenden Untersuchung von mehr als 100 Instrumenten in öffentlichen und privaten Sammlungen werden die Eingriffe untersucht, die notwendig waren, um ihre weitere Nutzung zu gewĂ€hrleisten. Die unterschiedlichen GeschĂ€ftsmodelle und Preise im Handel mit Lauten werden verglichen und mit dem Wissensvorrat unter Lautenisten ĂŒber alte Instrumente und deren Markencharakteristiken in Verbindung gebracht. Die Studie verwendet Methoden aus der Musikwissenschaft, der Organologie, der materiellen Kulturwissenschaft, der Akustik, der Ökonomie, der Kunstgeschichte, der Instrumentenbautechnologie und der Digital Humanities. Der multivalente Ansatz verbessert das VerstĂ€ndnis der allgemeinen Dynamik von Waren als Statussymbole, von Objektbiografien funktionaler Objekte und verbindet sie mit der materiellen und kulturellen Geschichte der Objekte am Beispiel der Laute

    Jews in East Norse Literature

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    This book explores the portrayal of Jews and Judaism in medieval Danish and Swedish literary and visual culture. Drawing on over 100 manuscripts and incunabula as well as runic inscriptions and religious art, the author describes the various, often contradictory, images ranging from antisemitism and anti-Judaism to the elevation of Jews as morally exemplary figures. It includes new editions of 54 East Norse texts with English translations

    IMAGINING, GUIDING, PLAYING INTIMACY: - A Theory of Character Intimacy Games -

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    Within the landscape of Japanese media production, and video game production in particular, there is a niche comprising video games centered around establishing, developing, and fulfilling imagined intimate relationships with anime-manga characters. Such niche, although very significant in production volume and lifespan, is left unexplored or underexplored. When it is not, it is subsumed within the scope of wider anime-manga media. This obscures the nature of such video games, alternatively identified with descriptors including but not limited to ‘visual novel’, ‘dating simulator’ and ‘adult computer game’. As games centered around developing intimacy with characters, they present specific ensembles of narrative content, aesthetics and software mechanics. These ensembles are aimed at eliciting in users what are, by all intents and purposes, parasocial phenomena towards the game’s characters. In other words, these software products encourage players to develop affective and bodily responses towards characters. They are set in a way that is coherent with shared, circulating scripts for sexual and intimate interaction to guide player imaginative action. This study defines games such as the above as ‘character intimacy games’, video game software where traversal is contingent on players knowingly establishing, developing, and fulfilling intimate bonds with fictional characters. To do so, however, player must recognize themselves as playing that type of game, and to be looking to develop that kind of response towards the game’s characters. Character Intimacy Games are contingent upon player developing affective and bodily responses, and thus presume that players are, at the very least, non-hostile towards their development. This study approaches Japanese character intimacy games as its corpus, and operates at the intersection of studies of communication, AMO studies and games studies. The study articulates a research approach based on the double need of approaching single works of significance amidst a general scarcity of scholarly background on the subject. It juxtaposes data-driven approaches derived from fan-curated databases – The Visual Novel Database and Erogescape -Erogē Hyƍron KĆ«kan – with a purpose-created ludo-hermeneutic process. By deploying an observation of character intimacy games through fan-curated data and building ludo-hermeneutics on the resulting ontology, this study argues that character intimacy games are video games where traversal is contingent on players knowingly establishing, developing, and fulfilling intimate bonds with fictional characters and recognizing themselves as doing so. To produce such conditions, the assemblage of software mechanics and narrative content in such games facilitates intimacy between player and characters. This is, ultimately, conductive to the emergence of parasocial phenomena. Parasocial phenomena, in turn, are deployed as an integral assumption regarding player activity within the game’s wider assemblage of narrative content and software mechanics

    Motions of the Soul: A Poetics of Religious Desire in Early Modern Metrical Psalms

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    Thesis advisor: Mary Crane“Motions of the Soul” explores and analyzes moments in the development of what I call an early modern poetics of religious desire, i.e. desire that has God as its referent. This poetics of religious desire builds upon but also departs from and transforms early modern Petrarchan and Ovidian poetics of secular erotic desire. I examine the poetics of religious desire in sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century metrical psalms, which are verse paraphrases of the lyric prayers that constitute the biblical book of Psalms. While much critical attention has been paid to seventeenth-century religious lyric poetry and its engagement with and response to contemporary secular love lyric traditions, much less attention has been paid to literary metrical psalms, which were the predominant form of religious poetry in the sixteenth century and, some have argued, the parent to the religious lyric poetry that flowered in the seventeenth century. This dissertation analyzes metrical psalms by Sir Thomas Wyatt, Anne Locke, Sir Philip Sidney, and George Herbert, exploring and demonstrating how these poets bring together the poetics of secular love poetry with the biblical poetics of the Psalms and contemporary theological and philosophical discourses on desire in order to develop a poetics of religious desire that illustrates and addresses early modern English culture’s interests and concerns in relation to desiring God.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2023.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: English

    Sex, Power, and Slavery

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    Sexual exploitation was and is a critical feature of enslavement. Across many different societies, slaves were considered to own neither their bodies nor their children, even if many struggled to resist. At the same time, paradoxes abound: for example, in some societies to bear the children of a master was a potential route to manumission for some women. Sex, Power, and Slavery is the first history of slavery and bondage to take sexuality seriously. Twenty-six authors from diverse scholarly backgrounds look at the vexed, traumatic intersections of the histories of slavery and of sexuality. They argue that such intersections mattered profoundly and, indeed, that slavery cannot be understood without adequate attention to sexuality. Sex, Power, and Slavery brings into conversation historians of the slave trade, art historians, and scholars of childhood and contemporary sex trafficking. The book merges work on the Atlantic world and the Indian Ocean world and enables rich comparisons and parallels between these diverse areas.  Contributors: David Brion Davis, Martin Klein, Richard Hellie, Abdul Sheriff, Griet Vankeerberghen, E. Ann McDougall, Matthew S. Hopper, Marie Rodet, George La Rue, Ulrike Schmieder, Tara Iniss, Mariana Candido, James Francis Warren, Johanna Ransmeier, Roseline Uyanga with Marie-Luise Ermisch, Francesca Ann Louise Mitchell, Shigeru Sato, Gabeba Baderoon, Charmaine Nelson, Ana Lucia Araujo, Brian Lewis, Ronaldo Vainfas, Salah Trabelsi, Joost Coté, Sandra Evers, and Subho Bas

    The Literary Fairy: Celtic Folklore’s Influence on Nineteenth-Century Fiction

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    There is a dissonance between the folkloric fairies and those presented by pop-cultural institutions such as Disney which has effected modern literary criticism of nineteenth-century British literature. The Disnified fairy is feminine, small, capable of flight, often with insect-like wings, and equipped with a magic wand with which she does good deeds to help others. She is largely based on fairy tales and is the embodiment of the modern conceptualization of the fairy, but she bears little, if any, resemblance to the fearsome fairies of Celtic folklore. Although nineteenth-century literature is rife with folkloric fairy references, those references are frequently undervalued by modern-day critics who read them through a Disney-tinted lens. Because such critics undervalue nineteenth-century fairy references, they overlook the voice the fairies give to marginalized groups in nineteenth-century societal discourses. This dissertation seeks to rectify this shortcoming by exploring the folklore published throughout the nineteenth century and applying it to nineteenth-century literature in a way that adds significance to those folkloric fairy references and highlights their place in nineteenth-century British social discourses. To more fully explore why nineteenth-century authors include references to the folkloric fairies in their works and to better understand how knowledge of this folklore helps the reader better interpret the work itself, each chapter of this dissertation explores the fairies in relationship to one of the century’s dominant social discourses: national identity, industrialism, science and religion, and childhood education. This dissertation also looks at atypical fairy works in relationship to each discourse. These are canonical works that are not typically discussed in relationship to the fairies, but which, I argue, either have characters within them that have yet to be properly identified as fairy or are fairy influenced

    Dress, Law and Naked Truth

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    This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Why are civil authorities in so-called liberal democracies affronted by public nudity and the Islamic full-face ‘veil’? Why is law and civil order so closely associated with robes, gowns, suits, wigs and uniforms? Why is law so concerned with the ‘evident’ and the need for justice to be ‘seen’ to be done? Why do we dress and obey dress codes at all? In this, the first ever study devoted to the many deep cultural connections between dress and law, the author addresses these questions and more. His responses flow from the radical thesis that ‘law is dress and dress is law’. Engaging with sources from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Shakespeare, Carlyle, Dickens and Damien Hirst, Professor Watt draws a revealing history of dress and civil order and offers challenging conclusions about the nature of truth and the potential for individuals to fit within the forms of civil life

    Rethinking Theatrical Documents in Shakespeare’s England

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    This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. Rethinking Theatrical Documents brings together fifteen major scholars to analyse and theorise the documents, lost and found, that produced a play in Shakespeare’s England. Showing how the playhouse frantically generated paratexts, it explores a rich variety of entangled documents, some known and some unknown: from before the play (drafts, casting lists, actors’ parts); during the play (prologues, epilogues, title-boards); and after the play (playbooks, commonplace snippets, ballads) – though ‘before’, ‘during’ and ‘after’ intertwine in fascinating ways. By using collective intervention to rethink both theatre history and book history, it provides new ways of understanding plays critically, interpretatively, editorially, practically and textually

    Disruption in the Arts

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    The volume examines aesthetic disruptions within the various arts in contemporary culture. It assumes that the political potential of art is not solely derived from presenting its audiences with openly political content. Rather, it creates a space of perception and interaction using formal means, thus problematizing the self-evidence of hegemonic structures of communication

    Multicultural Women\u27s Literature

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    Openly licensed anthology focused on the theme of the Multicultural Women\u27s Literature. Contains: American Indian Stories by Zikala-Sa (Gertrude Bonnin); Diaries of Court Ladies of Old Japan by Izumi Shikibu et al.; The Diwan of Zeb-un-Nissa by Zeb-un-Nissa; Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen, Liliuokalani; Kamala: a story of Hindu life by Krupabai Satthianadhan; Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims by Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins; Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe by Harriet Beecher Stowe; Memoirs of an Arabian Princess by Emily Ruete (Salamah bint SaĂŻd; Sayyida Salme, Princess of Zanzibar and Oman); Nightmare Tales by H.P. Blavatsky; Ratanbai: a sketch of a Bombay high cast Hindu young wife, by ShĂšvantibāi M. NikambĂ©.; Two Years in the Forbidden City by the Princess Der Ling; The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki Shikibu
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