This book highlights the links between politics and governance and the arts. The essays in the volume show how literature and music have challenged those in power risking political censure. In addition, they also try to delineate how patronage has been used for propaganda, or to stir up national fervour. They focus on the tension and symbiosis between the politician and the artist foregrounding how they have always tried to influence, challenge, and, in some cases, undermine one another. This volume will serve as an indispensable source for researchers and academics in political science, the humanities and performing arts.

This is the first book-length study to appear in English on the literary, cultural and political roots of modern Tibetan literature. While existing scholarship on modern Tibetan writing takes the 1980s as its point of “birth” and presents this period as marking a “rupture” with traditional forms of literature, this book goes beyond such an interpretation by foregrounding instead the persistence of Tibet’s artistic past and oral traditions in the literary creativity of the present. While acknowledging the innovative features of modern Tibetan literary creation, it draws attention to the hitherto neglected aspects of continuity within the new. This study explores the endurance of genres, styles, concepts, techniques, symbolisms, and idioms derived from Tibet’s rich and diverse oral art forms and textual traditions. It reveals how Tibetan kāvya poetics, the mgur genre, life-writing, the Gesar epic and other modes of oral and literary compositions are referenced and adapted in novel ways within modern Tibetan poetry and fiction. It also brings to prominence the complex and fertile interplay between orality and the Tibetan literary text. Embracing a multidisciplinary approach drawing on theoretical insights in western literary theory and criticism, political studies, sociology, and anthropology, this research shows that, alongside literary and oral continuities, the Tibetan nation proves to be an inevitable attribute of modern Tibetan literature.

Music and violence have been linked since antiquity in ritual, myth, and art. Considered together they raise fundamental questions about creativity, discourse, and music's role in society. The essays in this collection investigate a wealth of issues surrounding music and violence—issues that cross political boundaries, time periods, and media—and provide cross-cultural case studies of musical practices ranging from large-scale events to regionally specific histories. Following the editors' substantive introduction, which lays the groundwork for conceptualizing new ways of thinking about music as it relates to violence, three broad themes are followed: the first set of essays examines how music participates in both overt and covert forms of violence; the second section explores violence and reconciliation; and the third addresses healing, post-memorials, and memory. Music, Politics, and Violence affords space to look at music as an active agent rather than as a passive art, and to explore how music and violence are closely—and often uncomfortably—entwined. CONTRIBUTORS include Nicholas Attfield, Catherine Baker, Christina Baade, J. Martin Daughtry, James Deaville, David A. McDonald, Kevin C. Miller, Jonathan Ritter, Victor A. Vicente, and Amy Lynn Wlodarski.

If we have established that our approach to the phenomena that are other to us is always a matter of semiosis, and that even in an attempt to naturalize phenomenology, like the one made by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who points to the corporeity of consciousness as much as an intentionality of the body, it appears that our most negligible movements present our cultural being or habituality (cf. Iris Young, Throwing Like a Girl, 1990, 2005). However, many thinkers have claimed (for example, the novelist D. H. Lawrence or philosopher Luce Iragary) that we know by touch and intuition. The papers collected in this book examine our approach to these issues in an essentially post-theory world, particularly enquiring if twentieth century theory has left us clear directions of where we are supposed to be looking for new ways of understanding and representing the phenomenological. The way the Other exists in the consciousness that, as Hegel said, always pursues its death, becomes especially interesting in the context of the development of Anglo-American studies in the post-postmodern world which sees the West as a changeable cultural (and geographical) concept that incorporates a multiplicity of others. Yet, at the same time, a number of contemporary Anglo-American writers insists on the prolonged effects of colonialism in the modern world, in which outbursts of violence and hatred aimed at the Other prove that the modern world still cannot approach the Other without bigotry.

This volume explores the way in which composers, performers, and critics shaped individual and collective identities in music from Europe and the United States from the 1860s to the 1950s. Selected essays and articles engage with works and their reception by Richard Wagner, Georges Bizet (in an American incarnation), Lili and Nadia Boulanger, William Grant Still, and Aaron Copland, and with performers such as Wanda Landowska and even Marilyn Monroe. Ranging in context from the opera house through the concert hall to the salon, and from establishment cultures to counter-cultural products, the main focus is how music permits new ways of considering issues of nationality, class, race, and gender. These essays - three presented for the first time in English translation - reflect the work in both musical and cultural studies of a distinguished scholar whose international career spans the Atlantic and beyond.

Modern literature has always been obsessed by music. It cannot seem to think about itself without obsessing about music. And music has returned the favour. The Routledge Companion to Music and Modern Literature addresses this relationship as a significant contribution to the burgeoning field of word and music studies. The 37 chapters within consider the partnership through four lenses—the universal, opera and literature, musical and literary forms, and popular music and literature—and touch upon diverse and pertinent themes for our modern times, ranging from misogyny to queerness, racial inequality to the claimed universality of whiteness. This Companion therefore offers an essential resource for all who try to decode the musico-literary exchange.

"This book examines music's political power. It shows how music has been at the heart of accounts of political order, how musicians from Bono to Blue have claimed to speak for peoples and political causes. It looks at the emergence of music as an object of public policy, in the classroom or in the copyright courts, as the focus of national pride or employment opportunities. The book brings together ideas about music's political significance (from Aristotle to Rousseau, to Adorno and beyond) to tell of the extraordinary potency of music across time and space. At its heart lies the argument that music and politics are inseparably linked, and that each animates the other"--Back cover.