AHRC-DFG Project "Songs of the Revolution of 1848 and their Reception History in Germany"

This on-line project consists of commentaries and critical editions of the songs of the 'Vormaerz' and the 1848 Revolution which have shaped the cultural memory of this period in Germany. Looking at both textual and musical developments the research deals with the history of reception of key 1848 songs by established as well as anonymous poets. These together have formed an enduring corpus in the repertoires of singers of German political song. One of the main findings is how songs are not static: they evolve musically and textually and can undergo changes of function during a process of historical reception which is often ideologically motivated.

Berryman, Sexton and the Possibilities of Poetic Language

This paper examines a select number of poems by Middle Generation poets John Berryman and Anne Sexton in relation to questions of death, silence and the task that literature sets itself as understood in key works by Blanchot, Heidegger, and Levinas. Rather than recourse to the overtrodden critical path of confessional interpretations of their work, this paper connects Berryman’s The Dream Songs (1969) and two Sexton poems (‘Oh’ and ‘The Silence’) to the philosophical determinations of what it is language can say and what demands literature makes of the writer prepared to risk their own being in answer to its call. Central issues such as suicide and the originating silence of the work of art are intricately interwoven with Berryman’s and Sexton’s work. Leaving aside their biographies, and by approaching suicide as a philosophical problem with which their poetry wrestles, a restructured approach to their work becomes available. The impulse to suicide and the mental processes involved in considering and committing the act are instincts and responses located within an individual’s own psychology. For these writers particularly such issues are sited within a philosophical debate about language, what it can and cannot represent. If poetry articulates language’s argument about its own capability, it is the ideal forum for philosophical confrontations with the possibilities of existence as represented by the grave decision to take one’s own life. © The Author 2013.

Coelum non animum muto? Milton's Neo-Latin Poetry and Catholic Italy

Milton’s Elegiarum Liber, the first half of his Poemata published in Poems of Mr John Milton Both English and Latin (1645), concludes with a series of eight Latin epigrams: five bitterly anti-Catholic pieces on the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605, followed by three encomiastic poems hymning the praises of an Italian soprano, Leonora Baroni, singing in Catholic Rome. The disparity in terms of subject matter and tone is self-evident yet surprising in an epigrammatic series that runs sequentially. Whereas the gunpowder epigrams denigrate Rome, the Leonora epigrams present the city as a cultured hub of inclusivity, the welcome host of a Neapolitan soprano. In providing the setting for a human song that both enthrals its audience and attests to the presence of a divine power, Rome now epitomizes something other than brute idolatry, clerical habit or doctrine. And for the poet this facilitates an interrogation of theological (especially Catholic) doctrines. Coelum non animum muto, dum trans mare curro wrote the homeward-bound Milton in the autograph book of Camillo Cardoini at Geneva on 10 June 1639. But that this was an animus that could indeed acclimatize to religious and cultural difference is suggested by the Latin poems which Milton “patch [ed] up” in the course of his Italian journey. Central to that acclimatisation, as this chapter argues, is Milton’s quasi-Catholic self-fashioning. Thus Mansus offers a poetic autobiography of sorts, a self-inscribed vita coloured by intertextually kaleidoscopic links with two Catholic poets of Renaissance Italy and their patron; Ad Leonoram 1 both invokes and interrogates Catholic doctrine before a Catholic audience only to view the whole through the lens of a neo-Platonic hermeticism that may refreshingly transcend religious difference. Finally, Epitaphium Damonis, composed upon Milton’s return home, seems to highlight the potential interconnectedness of Protestant England and Catholic Italy, through the Anglo-Italian identity of its deceased subject, and through a pseudo-monasticism suggested by the poem’s possible engagement with the hagiography of a Catholic Saint. Perhaps continental travel and the physical encounter with the symbols, personages and institutions of the other have engendered in the Milton of the Italian journey a tolerance or, more accurately, the manipulation of a seeming tolerance to serve poetic and cultural ends.


First reviewer:
Haan: a fine piece by the senior neo-Latinist in Milton studies.

Second reviewer:
Chapter 7 is ... a high-spot of the collection. Its argument that in his Latin poetry Milton’s is a ‘quasi-Catholic self-fashioning’ stressing ‘the potential interconnectedness of Protestant England and Catholic Italy’ is striking and is advanced with learning, clarity and insight. Its sensitive exploration of the paradox of Milton’s coupling of humanistically complimentary and tolerant address to Roman Catholic friends with fiercely Protestant partisanship demonstrates that there is much greater complexity to his poetic persona than the self-construction and self-presentation of the later works would suggest. The essay is always adroit and sure-footed, often critically acute and illuminating (as, for example, in its discussion of the adjective and adverb mollis and molliter in Mansus, or in the identification in n. 99 of hitherto unnoticed Virgilian echoes). It has the added merits of being very well written, precise and apt in its citation of evidence, and absolutely central to the concerns of the volume.

SPHERE: Stormont Parliamentary Hansards: Embedded in Research and Education

SPHERE (Stormont Parliamentary Hansards: Embedded in Research and Education) was a JISC-funded project based at King’s College, London and Queen’s University, Belfast, working in Partnership with the Northern Ireland Assembly Library, and the NIA Official Report (Hansard). Its purpose was to assess the use, value and impact of The Stormont Papers digital resource, and to use the results of this assessment to make recommendations for a series of practical approaches to embed the resource within teaching, learning and research among the wider user community. The project began in November 2010 and was concluded in April 2010.

A series of formal reports on the project are published by JISC online at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/digitisation/impactembedding/sphere.aspx

SPHERE Impact analysis summary
Portable Document Format
SPHERE interviews report
SPHERE Outreach use case
SPHERE research use case
SPHERE teaching use_case
SPHERE web survey report
SPHERE web analysis

Oppositional Political Identity in the Song Culture of the Vormärz and the 1848 Revolution in Germany

Historically political song has often been perceived negatively, as a disturbance of the peace, summed up by the legendary line from Goethe’s Faust: “Politisches Lied – ein garstiges Lied”. In the period in Germany of the Vormärz (from 1815 up to the revolution of March 1848), however, we see how this perception may be changing as it increasingly becomes a means of self-expression in public life. This was the era of restauration, in which broader sections of German society are striving for political emancipation from the princes and kings. A whole host of political themes emerge in the songs (Freiheitslieder) of that period in which a new oppositional political consciousness is reflected. The themes range from freedom of speech, freedom from censorship, and the need for democratic and national self-determination to critiques of injustice and hunger, and parodies of political convention and opportunism. Sources of reception give indications about the social and political milieus in which these songs circulated. Such sources include broadsheets, handwritten manuscripts, song collections, commemoration events, advertisements in political press, memoires, police reports and general literature of the time. In many cases we see how these songs reflect the emerging social and political identities of those who sing them. One also sees the use of well known melodies in the popular dissemination of these songs. An intertextual function of music often becomes apparent in the practice of contrefacture whereby melodies with particular semantic associations are used to either underline the message or parody the subject of the song.

The Ocho Poetas Mexicanos and the marginalisation of Catholic authors in post-revolutionary Mexico

The group known as the Ocho Poetas Mexicanos were marginalised in post-revolutionary literary circles and remain largely forgotten by literary history because they were dismissed as Catholic authors by a literary establishment which favoured nation-building literature at a time when Catholicism was excluded from official constructions of nationhood. This article draws attention to the significant contribution made by group members to contemporary cultural life and re-evaluates the work they published in the 1955 anthology which announced their arrival onto the literary scene. An analysis of this collection demonstrates that there was scant justification for labelling the group as Catholic poets and suggests that they are best understood with reference to the “universal” strand of Mexican literature and as heirs to groups such as the Contemporáneos. The treatment of the Ocho Poetas provides important evidence of the way in which Catholic authors were marginalised in mid-twentieth century Mexico, even if they did not express religious beliefs in their work, and draws attention to the non-literary criteria which can come into play when evaluating texts.

Depicting Characters and danced Narratives: Handel, 'The Italian troupe', and Marie Sallé

Handel’s London career afforded opportunities for responding to dancers working in distinct styles of movement—most notably the Italian troupe resident at the King’s Theatre in 1726-27, and Marie Sallé at Covent Garden in 1734-35. By studying the dances from Admeto (1727) and Ariodante (1735), this paper will explore Handel's response to the serious and grotesque styles, as well as to the character and narrative modes.

Death and Consumer Culture

Among the most veiled and emotionally charged of life’s experiences are those related to death. Given that poetry has long been recognized as an unparalleled means of expressing and understanding the most complex and emotional aspects of life (Sherry and Schouten, 2002), it is of little surprise that few poets regarded as the finest of all wordsmiths have not, since time immemorial, grappled with death.

Recently, within marketing and consumer research, poetry has slowly but progressively come to be recognized as a means by which to understand, express, celebrate, and/or confront that which defies scientific or other more “scholarly” explanation (Canniford, 2012; Wijland, 2011; Sherry and Schouten, 2002). This “poetic turn” has manifest itself most notably within the nascent realm of Consumer Culture Theory (CCT); mainly in poetry reading sessions held—with published chapbooks in hand—in concurrence with the annual CCT symposium. Death-related poetry penned by marketing and consumer researchers has there entered—albeit randomly—the CCT circuit (see, for example: Arnould, 2014; Steinfield, 2014; Gabel, 2013, 2010; Downey, 2011, 2010a, 2010b, 2010c).

This chapter represents the first formal, organized attempt to better understand death-related consumption experience and meaning via the creation and dissemination of original works of poetry. The chapter’s title reflects the broad, eclectic perspective of death and consumption herein pursued. We consider funerary and other—good, service, and ideological—product consumption activities and experiences transpiring in the context of death. We also embrace the notion that death often brutally consumes those dealing with it; a sort of “consumption of consumers by death.” In turn, as vividly expressed in several of the poems in this chapter, consumption acts or experiences and/or memories thereof may be instrumental in coping with “being consumed by death.”