This book examines phenomena from Finnish and Finnish-Swedish literature written in the years between the 1980s and the first decade of the new millennium. Its objective is to study this interesting era of literary history in Finland and to sketch some possible directions for future development by identifying literary turning points which have already occurred.
Ton de Leeuw (1926-96) is probably one of the most influential composers at the crossroads between Eastern philosophy and Western technique. A one-time pupil of Olivier Messiaen's in Paris, throughout the latter years of his musical career he concentrated on the marriage of Western emphasis on action and tension, and the ethical function of music in Eastern traditions. The musical world of the …
Mythodologies challenges the implied methodology in contemporary studies in the humanities. We claim, at times, that we gather facts or what we will call evidence, and from that form hypotheses and conclusions. Of course, we recognize that the sum total of evidence for any argument is beyond comprehension; therefore, we construct, and we claim, preliminary hypotheses, perhaps to organize the ch…
Addressing the history of the production and reception of the great medieval poem, Piers Plowman, Lawrence Warner reveals the many ways in which scholars, editors and critics over the centuries created their own speculative narratives about the poem, which gradually came to be regarded as factually true. Warner begins by considering the possibility that Langland wrote a romance about a werewolf…
In 1798, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were engaged in a top secret experiment. This was not, as many assume, the creation of a book of poetry. A book emerged, to be sure—the landmark Lyrical Ballads. But in Murder Ballads, David John Brennan posits that the two poets were in fact pursuing far different ends: to birth from their poems a singular, idealized Poet. Despite their…
For more than 40 years, Jesper Hoffmeyer has been committed to the idea of developing “a semiotics of nature, or biosemiotics as he chose to call this effort, that could intelligibly explain how all the phenomena of inherent meaning and signification in living nature – from the lowest level of sign processes in unicellular organisms to the cognitive and social behavior of animals – can em…
Why did human beings first begin to write history? Lisa Irene Hau argues that a driving force among Greek historians was the desire to use the past to teach lessons about the present and for the future. She uncovers the moral messages of the ancient Greek writers of history and the techniques they used to bring them across. Hau also shows how moral didacticism was an integral part of the writin…
Mongrel Nation surveys the history of the United Kingdom's African, Asian, and Caribbean populations from 1948 to the present, working at the juncture of cultural studies, literary criticism, and postcolonial theory. Ashley Dawson argues that during the past fifty years Asian and black intellectuals from Sam Selvon to Zadie Smith have continually challenged the United Kingdom's exclusionary def…
The study of South Asian music falls under the purview of ethnomusicology, whereas that of South Asian literature falls under South Asian studies. As a consequence of this academic separation, scholars rarely take notice of connections between South Asian song and poetry. Modernizing Composition overcomes this disciplinary fragmentation by examining the history of Sinhala-language song and poet…
Situated at the intersection between the history, historiography and aesthetics of twentieth-century music, this study uses Benjamin Britten’s operas to illustrate the ways in which composers, critics and audiences mediated the “great divide” between modernism and mass culture. Reviving mid-century discussions of the “middlebrow,” Chowrimootoo demonstrates how these works allowed audi…