The Musical Crowd in English Fiction, 1840-1910 : Class, Culture and Nation

This book provides insight into how musical performances contributed to emerging ideas about class and national identity. Offering a fresh reading of bestselling fictional works, drawing upon crowd theory, climate theory, ethnology, science, music reviews and books by musicians to demonstrate how these discourses were mutually constitutive. "Fairy Tales, Natural History and Victorian Culture deals with the way in which natural history was connected to the world of fairies and highlights how shifts in the understanding of natural history, especially after 1859, had a significant impact on fairy stories and Victorian experiments with the literary fairy tale. By exploring the interaction between scientific and literary fields, this book shows the ways in which natural knowledge was shaped and disseminated in Victorian culture and illuminates cultural practices through which new representations of nature and the natural world were popularised. This original approach to Victorian culture, blending studies of fictional and non-fictional narratives, examines therefore a part of the history of the mediation of knowledge about nature in the Victorian period and points out how the mediation of this new knowledge contributed to the Victorians' awareness of environmental issues"-- Provided by publisher "Colonial Girlhood in Literature, Culture and History, 1840-1950 explores a range of real and fictional colonial girlhood experiences from Jamaica, Mauritius, South Africa, India, New Zealand, Australia, England, Ireland, and Canada to reflect on the transitional state of girlhood between childhood and adulthood. The interconnected themes of colonialism, empire, gender, race, and class show how colonial girls occupy ambivalent positions in British and settler societies between 1840 and 1950. Although girlhood is often linked to freedom, independence, novelty, and modernity, it may also represent an idea that needs to be contained and controlled to serve the needs of the nation. Across national boundaries, the malleability of colonial girlhoods is evident. Drawing on a range of approaches including history, anthropology, and literary and cultural studies, this book reflects on the complexities of girlhood during the colonial era."-- Provided by publisher Front Matter....Pages i-ix Introduction....Pages 1-29 Surveillance and Musical Passion in Villette....Pages 30-55 Germanic Music Ideals in Utopian Communities: Charles Auchester, Erewhon and “Euphonia”....Pages 56-82 Music, Climate Theory and the Working Classes in Sandra Belloni....Pages 83-109 Imagining 1848 Risorgimento Opera Production in Vittoria....Pages 110-129 Shaw’s Fiction and the Emerging English Musical Renaissance....Pages 130-155 From Collective Action to Creative Individuality: Robert Elsmere, Dodo, Althea and Howards End....Pages 156-184 Conclusion....Pages 185-189 Back Matter....Pages 190-245 "Phyllis Weaver examines the theme of the 'musical crowd' alongside Victorian social, political, and scientific theories. While usually considered discrete fields today, the fictional works demonstrate that discourses of group management, ethnology, climate, nation, class, and music were highly interactive during a span of at least seventy years. The exchanges between these fields are not readily apparent in looking at the documents produced by the musical profession alone, so fictional works offer unique and significant insight into how various discourses were imagined as mutually constitutive."--Jacket