Despite several recent monographs, editions and recordings devoted to the reassessment of British music in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, some negative perceptions still remain--particularly a sense that British composers in this period somehow lacked literary credentials. British Music and Literary Context counters this perception by showing that these composers displayed a real confidence and assurance in refiguring literary texts in their music. The book explores how a literary context might offer modern audiences and listeners a 'way in' to appreciate specific works that have traditionally been viewed as problematic. Each chapter of this interdisciplinary study juxtaposes a British composer with a particular literary counterpart or genre. Issues highlighted in the book include the vexed relationship between words and music, the refiguring of literary narratives as musical structures, and the ways in which musical settings or representations of literary texts might be seen as critical 'readings' of those texts. Anyone interested in nineteenth-century British music, literature and Victorian studies will enjoy this thought-provoking and perceptive book.

This book is about the intertextual relationships between the works of the Shelleys and the Brownings. While a lot of research has been done on the relationship between Percy Bysshe Shelley and Robert Browning, virtually nothing has been said about the links between Mary Shelley and Robert Browning, and very little on the connections between the Shelleys and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Rieko Suzuki seeks to address this blind spot by focusing on three areas in particular: firstly, the way that Browning’s later poems reflect back on and re-engage with Shelley’s work; secondly, Mary Shelley’s influence on Browning’s early poems; and thirdly, Shelley’s presence in and influence on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s writing. In mapping out the various ways in which texts relate to other texts, the book also identifies a number of important thematic threads that run throughout the work of all four writers. These include theories of history and historical consciousness, providing a further dimension to the question of ‘influence’. They also include ideas about exile, gender, liberal politics and cultural heritage, central to almost all the texts discussed here, as the Shelleys and the Brownings, in different ways and in varying contexts, tried to negotiate the possibility of a more tolerant and resilient social, political and cultural environment.