Magnificat Puns


Book Description

MAGNIFICAT PUNS gives new meaning to the word PURRseverance. --Joan O'Brien, Andover, VT PURRsonally speaking, I had lots of fun trying to figure out these brain teasers. --Barbara Murray, Mesa, AZ MAGNIFICAT PUNS accomplished its PURRPUSS of making me laugh. --Joe Martz, New York City I found the puns to be very CATchy. --Pat Chaplain, Easton, MD We hope to PURRsuade everyone we know to buy this book! --Fritz and Mary Kautz, Mahwah, NJ




Mania and Literary Style


Book Description

This highly original study of the 'manic style' in enthusiastic writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries identifies a literary tradition and line of influence running from the radical visionary and prophetic writing of the Ranters and their fellow enthusiasts to the work of Jonathan Swift and Christopher Smart. Clement Hawes offers a counterweight to recent work which has addressed the subject of literature and madness from the viewpoint of contemporary psychological medicine, putting forward instead a stylistic and rhetorical analysis. He argues that the writings of dissident 'enthusiastic' groups are based in social antagonisms; and his account of the dominant culture's ridicule of enthusiastic writing (an attitude which persists in twentieth-century literary history and criticism) provides a powerful and daring critique of pervasive assumptions about madness and sanity in literature.




Steeple Chasing


Book Description

The Sunday Times paperback bestseller and Waterstones Non-Fiction Book of the Month *Featuring a brand new chapter!* 'Never have the joys of exploring the churches and cathedrals of this country been so vividly conveyed as they are in this engaging and elegiac book.' - New Statesman **BOOK OF THE YEAR pick 2023** 'A delicious treat' - Financial Times **TRAVEL BOOK OF THE YEAR pick 2023** 'A charming odyssey' - The Times 'A wonderful book; thoughtful and challenging' - Daily Telegraph ***** 'A beautiful book' - Gabriel Byrne 'Beautiful and brilliant. I loved it' - Fergus Butler-Gallie From the author of A Tomb With a View - Scottish Non-Fiction book of the Year Churches are all around us. Their steeples remain landmarks in our towns, villages and cities, even as their influence and authority has waned. They contain art and architectural wonders - one huge gallery scattered, like a handful of jewels, across these isles. Award-winning writer Peter Ross sets out to tell their stories, and through them a story of Britain. Join him as he visits the unassuming Norfolk church which contains a disturbing secret, and London's mighty cathedrals with their histories of fire and love. Meet cats and bats, monks and druids, angels of oak and steel. Steeple Chasing, though it sometimes strikes an elegiac note, is a song of praise. It celebrates churches for their beauty and meaning, and for the tales they tell. It is about people as much as place, flesh and bone not just flint and stone. From the painted hells of Surrey to the holy wells of Wales, consider this a travel book . . . with bells on. Praise for Peter Ross 'Ross is a wonderfully evocative writer, deftly capturing a sense of place and history, while bringing a deep humanity to his subject. He has written a delightful book.' - The Guardian 'Fascinating . . . Ross makes a likeably idiosyncratic guide and one finishes the book feeling strangely optimistic about the inevitable.' - The Observer 'The author's humanity has acted as a beacon of light in the darkness.' - The Sunday Times




Poets of Sensibility and the Sublime


Book Description

A collection of critical essays on English poetry during the Age of Sensibility and the Sublime, the half-century between the death of Alexander Pope in 1744 and the death of Robert Burns in 1796.




Christopher Smart's English Lyrics


Book Description

In the first full-length study of Christopher Smart’s translations and the place and function of translation in Smart’s poetry, Rosalind Powell proposes a new approach to understanding the relationship between Smart’s poetics and his practice. Drawing on translation theory from the early modern period to the present day, this book addresses Smart's translations of Horace, Phaedrus and the Psalms alongside the better-known religious works such as Jubilate Agno and A Song to David. Five recurrent threads run throughout Powell’s study: the effect of translation on the identity of a narrative voice in a rewritten text; the techniques that are used to present translated texts to a new literary, cultural and linguistic readership; performance and reading contexts; the translation of great works as an attempt to achieve literary permanence; and, finally, the authorial influence of Smart himself in terms of the overt religiosity and nationalism that he champions in his writing. In exploring Smart’s major translation projects and revisiting his original poems, Powell offers insights into classical reception and translation theory; attitudes towards censorship; expressions of nationalism in the period; developments in liturgy and hymnody; and the composition of children’s books and school texts in the early modern era. Her detailed analysis of Smart’s translating poetics places them within a new, contemporary context and locality to uncover the poet's works as a coherent project of Englishing.




Bach


Book Description

Updated and refreshed with new biographical information and understanding of Bach's contemporary context, Bach traces the composer's student years, professional career, and family life alongside his most famous compositions.




All Music Guide to Classical Music


Book Description

Offering comprehensive coverage of classical music, this guide surveys more than eleven thousand albums and presents biographies of five hundred composers and eight hundred performers, as well as twenty-three essays on forms, eras, and genres of classical music. Original.




The Music of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach


Book Description

Of the four sons of J.S. Bach who became composers, Carl Philipp Emanuel (1714-88) was the most prolific, the most original, and the most influential both during and after his lifetime. This first full-length English-language study critically surveys his output, examining not only the famous keyboard sonatas and concertos but also the songs, chamber music, and sacred works, many of which resurfaced in 1999 and have not previously been evaluated. The bookalso outlines the composer's career from his student days at Leipzig and Frankfurt (Oder) to his nearly three decades as court musician to Prussian King Frederick "the Great" and his last twenty years as cantor at Hamburg. Focusing on the composer's choices within his social and historical context, the book shows how C.P.E. Bach deliberately avoided his father's style while adopting the manner of his Berlin colleagues, derived from Italian opera. Anew perspective on the composer emerges from the demonstration that C.P.E. Bach, best known for his virtuoso keyboard works, refashioned himself as a writer of vocal music and popular chamber compositions in response to changingcultural and aesthetic trends. Supplementary texts and musical examples are included on a companion website. David Schulenberg is professor of music at Wagner College and teaches historical performance at the JuilliardSchool. He is the author of The Music of Wilhelm Friedemann Bach (University of Rochester Press, 2010).







Geoffrey Hartman


Book Description

`The critic explicitly acknowledges his dependence on prior words that make his word a kind of answer. He calls to other texts "that they might answer him."' Geoffrey Hartman is the first book devoted to an exploration of the `intellectual poetry' of the critic who, whether or not he `represents the future of the profession', is a unique and major voice in twentieth-century criticism. Professor Atkins explains clearly Hartman's key ideas and places his work in the contexts of Romanticism and Judaism on which he has written extensively. In Geoffrey Hartman he provides a valuable introduction to a major critical voice who has called into question our assumptions about the distinction between commentary and imaginative literature.