The universally acclaimed and award-winning Oxford History of Western Music is the eminent musicologist Richard Taruskin's provocative, erudite telling of the story of Western music from its earliest days to the present. Each book in this superlative five-volume set illuminates-through a representative sampling of masterworks- the themes, styles, and currents that give shape and direction to a significant period in the history of Western music. This first volume in Richard Taruskin's majestic history, Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century , sweeps across centuries of musical innovation to shed light on the early forces that shaped the development of the Western classical tradition. Beginning with the invention of musical notation more than a thousand years ago, Taruskin addresses topics such as the legend of Saint Gregory and Gregorian chant, Augustine's and Boethius's thoughts on music, the liturgical dramas of Hildegard of Bingen, the growth of the music printing business, the literary revolution and the English madrigal, the influence of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, and the operas of Monteverdi. Laced with brilliant observations, memorable musical analysis, and a panoramic sense of the interactions between history, culture, politics, art, literature, religion, and music, this book will be essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand this rich and diverse period.

"Phillip Lopate is a lifelong movie-lover-and an award-winning essayist-so it was perhaps inevitable that he would write so much on film. Coming of age, cinematically speaking, in the early 1960s, Lopate immersed himself in the films of the French New Wave, the Italian Neorealists, and directors such as Satyji Ray and Akira Kurosawa, and American independent filmmakers like John Cassavettes and Shirley Clarke. The formal qualities and innovation he found in many of those films along with their emotional intensity have continued to set the bar for Lopate's viewing and his interest in what he terms, art house cinema as well as classic Hollywood films given new life in retrospectives. In My Affair with Art House Cinema, Phillip Lopate writes about those movies that have most captivated him over the past twenty-five years upon rewatching or watching for the first time. He discusses films by leading global contemporary filmmakers such as Olivier Assayas, Youssef Chahine, Claire Denis, Abbas Kiarostami, David Lynch, Richard Linklater, Lena Dunham, David Cronenberg, Jafar Panahi, Hong Sang-soo Hou Hsaio-hsien, and Chantal Akerman. He also returns to the works of older filmmakers ranging from Godard and Ozu to John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock. Throughout these essays, Lopate's critiques and celebration of a wide variety of films convey the excitement and appreciation for the visceral pleasures and profound insight that movies offer"--

An expanded edition of revered theorist Michael Löwy's Morning Star: Marxism and Surrealism (previously published in French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and Greek), this masterwork collects the author's essays on the ways in which surrealism intersected with a variety of revolutionary political approaches, ranging from utopian ideals to Marxism and situationism. Taking its title from André Breton's essay "Arcane 17," which casts the star as the searing firebrand of rebellion, Löwy's provocative work spans many perspectives. These include surrealist artists who were deeply interested in Marxism and anarchism (Breton among them), as well as Marxists who were deeply interested in surrealism (Walter Benjamin in particular). Probing the dialectics of innovation, diversity, continuity, and unity throughout surrealism's international presence, Morning Star also incorporates analyses of Claude Cahun, Guy Debord, Pierre Naville, José Carlos Mariátegui and others, accompanied by numerous reproductions of surrealist art. An extraordinarily rich collection, Morning Star promises to ignite new dialogues regarding the very nature of dissent.

In this collection of essays, twenty-four leading scholars examine the major developments that have expanded the horizons of English and American literary studies during recent decades.Redrawing the Boundaries reviews the significant scholarship for major historical periods and surveys new directions in literary criticism and in composition studies. Each essay is accompanied by an annotated list of suggestions for further reading; the book concludes with an extensive list of works cited and a name index.For scholars, teachers, and students of literature, this remarkable work provides an essential overview of traditions and innovations that make up English and American literary studies today. -- Amazon.com.

This volume is the first attempt to offer a panoramic historical overview of South Asian classical poetry, especially in Sanskrit. Many of the essays in this volume are the first serious studies of the great masterpieces of South Asian literature. Moreover, the book as a whole captures the millennium-long developmental logic of kavya literature by identifying a series of critical moments of breakthrough and innovation-that is, moments when the basic rules of composition and the aesthetic and poetic goals underwent dramatic change, allowing the tradition to reinvent itself. Individual sections thus focus on the beginnings of kavya literature and Kalidasa's creation of what came to be its classical form; the new poetic model that emerged from the intense competition and conversation of Bharavi and Magha in the middle of the first millennium; the extended revolutionary period in Kanauj, where Bana and his successors reconceived the meaning and practice of Sanskrit poetry; and the no less transformative period at the beginning of the second millennium, when poets of genius such as Sriharsa were active in the context of India's nascent vernacularization. The scope of the volume extends beyond Sanskrit to early modern Hindi, and beyond the subcontinent and the Himalayas to Java and Tibet, where kavya found a new home and continued to evolve. A general introduction proposes a theoretical framework for the study of this immense literary tradition in terms of its continuous self-reinvention. --

Zusammenfassung: "Gustav Mahler and Julius Korngold, critic at the highly influential newspaper Neue Freie Presse, had much in common. He, along with his fellow journalists, were close to and supportive of Mahler. For the first time, their essays on the man and his music are made available in English. The essays on Mahler and his time at Vienna's Imperial Opera were extensive and well informed. Julius Korngold had replaced Eduard Hanslick as principal music critic. Both Korngold and Mahler shared a common Moravian Jewish background, born in 1860 and both students of Anton Bruckner. Mahler also took an early interest in Korngold's son, the child prodigy Erich Wolfgang Korngold. The paper was Jewish owned, and Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist Movement, was its cultural editor and Julius Korngold's employer. Claims that Mahler was driven out of a Vienna by an antisemitic press are wrong given Mahler's support by the most powerful critic of the day writing in the Empire's most influential newspaper. Importantly, the essays also reveal a world of Modernism that includes Mahler's innovations at the opera, and Modernism in music before departures from tonality. This book will interest Mahler enthusiasts, musicians and cultural historians. Mahler was claimed by Arnold Schoenberg as his musical hero, firmly placing him in the Modernist camp. Yet Korngold was universally seen as an archconservative and his relationship with Mahler was personal and his understanding profound. The book addresses the question of "Mahler, the first Modernist or the last Romantic?""--