bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Discussion on Billy Budd (1960)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

CROZIER: We began discussing the idea of writing an opera together some months before we found Billy Budd; I think it was in August 1948 that we had a first meeting and simply talked very enthusiastically, but very vaguely, about an opera that we might one day write. And a month or two later Morgan, you and I had a further meeting to discuss this idea of collaboration, but still we had no subject. And then I think you had a letter from Ben. FORSTER: Then I had-he and I had discussed some subject; it was a comedy opera I think-wasn’t it?-which was very nice but I didn’t see what I could do about it.CROZIER: You in fact weren’t very keen on the idea of comedy. FORSTER: Well I didn’t think I could manage it-that was all. CROZIER: Well, I remember one thing that you said to me which was that you didn’t really approve of the idea of a comedy because if it were to be modern it would have to be satirical, and if it were to be an opera about the past it would inevitably be nostalgic, and you weren’t very much interested in either of these fields. FORSTER: Yes. I remember anyhow that died out and then I got a letter from Ben-unfortunately I have destroyed it, as I destroy so much-quite a short one suggesting this Melville thing Billy Budd, and I wrote back and said yes; it suited me at once and I was absolutely delighted to get this tiny note.
Imogen Holst: An ABC of Music (1963)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

A young friend of mine has been playing the guitar for several years now.1 He has a real aptitude for it: a feeling for the sound of the instrument, a considerable gift for technique, and patience to work hard. But he cannot read music and knows nothing of how music is made, and, what is more, he simply refuses to learn. ‘Too dull and too much trouble’, he says, ‘and anyhow not worth it’. It is true, of course, that a lot of his time is spent in playing dance music, when sight-reading is perhaps not so essential, but he has a considerable interest in straight music, and the lute parts of Dowland have a real fascination for him. When this book is published I want to send him a copy, because he will see that learning to read music, and learning its grammar, need not be dull or too much trouble. He will also discover when he can sight-read that it is really ‘worth it’. Maybe you can pick up tunes and approximate block harmonies without being able to read, but I challenge anyone with that (rather over-rated) gift of playing or singing ‘by ear’ to pick up easily and quickly a Dowland accompaniment exactly as he wrote it (and the ‘exactly’ matters), or the Stravinsky dance-rhythms, or the inner part of a complicated madrigal or partsong-as most of us with experience of amateur choral singing can testify.No, it won’t be only to this guitar boy that I shall send copies of this book, but to many of my friends who sing or play the recorder in amateur groups, and who spend frequent and distressing moments ‘getting lost’.
Address to Kesgrave Heath School, Ipswich (1963)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

Boys and girls, my Lord, ladies and gentlemen:I have just seen a little of your new school. I went round some of the classes in the infants’ school and it is a wonderful, wonderful new building that you have there, and I congratulate you all on the achievement of these new, reconstructed buildings.However, there are some of you, I expect, you who remember the old school as it was, who find it a little uneasy in your new buildings.I always think that moving house, moving school, is a little like getting a new suit of clothes. You’ve got to get used to it. They’re very smart and-but they don’t always quite fit properly and sometimes one’s mother may be quite right when she throws away that old pair of trousers that one was so fond of, because it did get a little small, and I think the old buildings as they were got a little bit too small for you.And so now you’ve got these splendid new buildings and I think your architect has done very well, and I’m sure you’re going to be very happy in your new suit of clothes-I mean your new buildings.It is very good, I think, that we should have nice places to work in. Now I’m not going to be a silly old man and say how dreadful life was when we were young and how we used to work in dark, black cellars and were beaten every day of our lives, because it simply isn’t true; but we didn’t have such beautiful buildings as you have here. We didn’t have lovely airy rooms-at least, I didn’t.
Britten Looking Back (1963)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

As a child I heard little music outside my own home. There were the local choral society concerts and the very occasional chamber concert, but the main event was the Norwich Triennial Festival. There in 1924, when I was ro, I heard Frank Bridge conduct his suite ‘The Sea,’ and was knocked sideways.1It turned out that my viola teacher, Audrey Alston, was an old friend of Bridge’s. He always stayed with her, and when the success of ‘The Sea’ brought him to Norwich again in 1927 with a specially written work called ‘Enter Spring,’ I was taken to meet him.We got on splendidly, and I spent the next morning with him going over some of my music (I’d been writing music since I was about five).2 From that moment I used to go regularly to him, staying with him in Eastbourne or in London, in the holidays from my prep school.Even though I was barely in my teens, this was immensely serious and professional study; and the lessons were mam moth. I remember one that started at half past ten, and at tea-time Mrs. Bridge came in and said, ‘Really, you must give the boy a break.’ Often I used to end these marathons in tears; not that he was beastly to me, but the concentrated strain was too much for me. I was perhaps too young to take in so much at the time, but I found later that a good deal of it had stuck firmly.This strictness was the product of nothing but professionalism. Bridge insisted on the absolutely clear relationship of what was in my mind to what was on the paper. I used to get sent to the other side of the room; Bridge would play what I’d written and demand if it was what I’d really meant.I continued to write a vast amount under his guidance-orchestral music, string quartets, piano music and many songs, of which the only one to survive publicly is ‘The Birds’.3 I had a terrible struggle with this before finding what has been called ‘the right ending in the wrong key.’4 Bridge made me go on and on at it, worrying out what hadn’t come right, until I spotted that the cycle of changing keys for each verse needed such an ending.
Dreams (?1965)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

I have never been able to eat mushrooms-. One night I dreamed that I was standing on the top of a mountain with a friend. Together we watched the final atomic-bomb explosion, the explosion that was going to end the world as we know it. As we watched the great mushroom-like cloud approaching us, I turned to him & said, quite calmly, ‘Now you see why I have never liked mushrooms’.
On Receiving The Sonning Prize (1968)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

Ladies & Gentlemen, I suppose I shouldn’t be pleased, honoured, flattered at receiving a prize.1 As a composer I should be above success, honours & prizes. A composer should be entirely self-contained, communing alone with his muse, happy in his garret, in glorious self-sufficiency. But really, that is not the case, & having read alot about the lives of the great masters, I know it has never been so-they have never been fond of their garrets. What is more, I shouldn’t believe a composer who said he was. Music, particularly of all the arts, must have an audience, an audience as well as performers. And what is more gratifying than when the audience & performers like your music? It is sad of course if no one likes what you do,& apart from making your music better & clearer, there is not much you can do about it.But when, as to-night, one has a fine performance of one’s work, & at the end of it a handsome prize, well-one can’t ask for much more! Thank you (Mrs Sonning) for this wonderful prize-not only I, but many of the worthy causes that I have much at heart will benefit from it-thank you on the stage & in the pit for the lovely performance, & you in the audience for applauding it; thank you for welcoming me here to your beautiful city which I have known & loved for 20 years, the city, the country & the people-thank you all from the bottom of my heart.
Mapreading (1969)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

MITCHELL: Earlier this year you were heavily engaged in the television production of Peter Grimes. I know it was a great physical strain for you, because it must have been an enormous undertaking. But I think you were impressed and intrigued-were you not?-by all the possibilities of putting one of your major operas on television?BRITTEN: It was a very great experience. It was, as you say, also rather alarming and tiring, simply because the handling of this enormous force of performers, and also of course fitting in with the wishes of the cameramen and the producers and directors, was something that I had never tried before. It was a much bigger enterprise than I had imagined I could ever try. But actually the people I was working with were so musical and understood the musical side of the work so well that my task was made much easier.MITCHELL: Do you think, Ben, as a result of this experience with televisionwhich took place, almost literally, on your own doorstep-that television opera has got a great future? That the possibilities for opera on television are really very considerable?BRITTEN: I think the answer is a definite ‘yes’ for that, but I think there are one or two lessons that one must learn before really committing opera to television; and ifl can be slightly technical for a moment I would like to say what they are, these lessons. One is that I am sure the opera must have a musical intensity on television: it must not get broken up into a vehicle for the cameras only. I have seen quite a few television versions of operas, and I think the danger can easily come that they are made, if I may say so, too reasonable, too realistic. And then one asks-I am sure the audience, the non-operatic audience, asks itself-why in the blazes people are singing and not speaking. You have got to keep this knife-edged balance between the photograph, the picture, which of course in a television medium must be rather realistic, it has that realistic impact on one, and also the musical excitement.And I think what I have learnt from the television [production] of Peter Grimes is that the drive forward of the music, the singing of the tunes, the elaboration of the ensembles, must never be forgotten. If you do, you get a kind of misfire, which is neither straight drama nor good opera. And that is the sort of thing that I’ve learnt and I’m trying to put into practice in this opera I’m now writing for television.
Money For The Maltings (1970)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

TusA: The second time in five years you’re setting out to raise money; how do you feel about it?BRITTEN: Very depressed quite frankly. Depressed because one depends-one has depended in the past so much on our near and dear good friends to give us money. We’ve virtually never had one big gift; I mean the Arts Council has been very generous, and one or two business firms-Decca, for instance-have been very generous, but the bulk of the money in our first big money-raising appeal came from our subscribers to the Festival and the artists who’ve helped us over and over again. But the thought of having to start again, literally within a month of having achieved the first lot, is very frightening.TusA: Are you finding that there is more and more of a clash between the time that you have to spend in fund-raising and administration and the time you spend in writing music?BRITTEN: Well one’s life without administration is a very, very full one. And up ‘til now one’s been able to do it-to combine the two activities fairly easily. There have been clashes, I must admit, but now, with this big planning operation coming, the battle is already lost, I would say. I mean, for instance, these last few days I have been up in London conducting the operas, I’ve done some records,1 and I came down here today to write music quickly before I go off to America and of course . . .
Aaron Copland: Seventieth-Birthday Tribute
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

Over the last few years Copland has been a regular visitor to this country; his lively and versatile conducting of the London Symphony Orchestra has become remarkably popular. It is a lot to do with these concerts that his own music has become so much better known here. For many of us no other music quite expresses the individual character and atmosphere of North Americayoung, fresh and gay, with considerable friendliness and warmth-but which also faces up to the disturbing problems which rack that enormous continent today. Notwithstanding this considerable ‘local’ colour the music is expressed in sophisticated and ‘international’ techniques which we can all appreciate. Not many people on this side of the Atlantic realise, however, although they might guess it if they had heard or met him during his visit to the [Aldeburgh] Festival in 1960, what a strong and healthy influence Aaron has had on the American musical scene; how he has supported all kinds of new music, helped younger composers, fought for higher standards of performance, for more adequate subsidies, and has taken brave stands on moral issues outside the purely musical world. Those who wish to find out something of his sympathetic attitudes should read his wise, instructive and entertaining books.
James Blades: Percussion Instruments And Their History (1970)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

Everyone knows that James Blades is one of our great percussionists.1 He plays all the various instruments with accuracy and an infectious sense of rhythm, and his timpani playing is noted for its impeccable intonation and beautiful tone. I have been a lucky composer because, under my direction, he has played in ten of my operas, and also in those two difficult percussive nuts to crackthe Nocturne and Cello Symphony.Not so many know that Blades is a brilliant and resourceful craftsman, experimenting with skill and ingenuity in the making and assembling of many of the instruments he plays, and in the creation of new ones. Some of the instruments he has made for me--often from the slenderest hints-are described in Chapter 16.2All his colleagues, and I am proud to consider myself as one, know what a generous friend Jimmy Blades is; how he will help an inexperienced player; how he will hurry to this or that school to advise the young in their percussion problems, or turn up at a recording session to give them confidence; and he will lend out his instruments, often at serious inconvenience to himself. We, who have toured abroad with him, have seen excited groups gathering around him after rehearsals and performances, commenting or questioning. Goodness knows what language he uses, but no matter, since he has a Slav-like ease of communication with everyone.Now, on the publication of this great book, a large public will realise what a scholar Professor James Blades is. Of course many will have heard his enchanting lectures, or read his informative guides to Percussion Instruments, but now the vast range of his learning must come as a surprise.
Therapy In Music For Handicapped Children (1971)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

This is an intensely moving, as well as a very important book. It is the story of a distinguished American composer virtually stopping his ‘abstract’ composing, as it were, in mid-career and using his talents and energies to discover ways of helping by music mentally deprived children. I imagine Paul Nordoff previously knew little of this tragic side of life, and it was a shattering experience for him to come into contact with it: a glance at the illustrations at the back of this book can give a hint of that. This quietly written account of his and Mr. Robbins’ patient experiments, their journeys into the obscured world of these children, will not easily be forgotten.I am not qualified to comment on the importance of the psychological cures that these two men have achieved, nor of the extension of diagnosis. But this I can say-the book is as well highly important for musicians, particularly composers. At this curious moment in musical history the validity of communication in art has itself been called in question, and it is wonderful to have a book where the concentration is entirely on just this, on communication pure and simple. Any and every form of musical style and technique is tried and used: scales, old and new, chords, rhythms, new kinds of instruments-I long to introduce my friend Rostropovich to the one-stringed ‘cello, to find out what he could do with it. It is indeed salutary to have a description of a composer humbly and un-self-consciously indulging in every sort of freedom, and being guided solely by his success in communicating with, and concern for the wellbeing of, his young, sick listeners. I can recommend this book wholeheartedly not only to humanitarian readers, but to my musical colleagues as well.We can all learn from it.
Anthony Gishford: Grand Opera (1972)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

I was most interested to learn that my friend Anthony Gishford was producing a book on opera, in the context of the great Opera Houses of the world.1 His knowledge of the subject is wide, for he has been a keen amateur of opera all his life, and for the last twenty years or so he has actively taken part in its administration, encouraging those who perform and create it.I am interested in the book because for thirty years writing operas has been my main musical occupation. Many complain about this, those who do not like the medium, who distrust it (‘impure!’), would rather I wrote more symphonies, quartets, concertos, song cycles and cello suites. Be that as it may, ever since those fruitless struggles with Paul Bunyan up to the immediate struggles with the problems of Death in Venice I have been fascinated by the most powerful medium of musical communication that I know.2There have always been Cassandras.3 Before Peter Grimes there was no future for an English opera. In spite of its favourable reception in 1945 those responsible for its production were all summarily removed from Sadlers Wells.4 There was no money (there never is) for opera, so a group of friends and I tried to devise a cheaper form of it-no chorus, tiny cast, an orchestra of twelve. After a successful opening of The Rape of Lucretia at Glyndebourne and an encouraging visit abroad, a dismal tour of the English provinces followed-’casts must be international’-and so we were compelled to start our own opera group, and our own Aldeburgh Festival.
Rossetti, the Sexualized Woman, and the Late I 850s
Authors: Bullen J B
Published: November 2023

The Return to the flesh and to the body in Pre-Raphaelite painting took a form which Kingsley would not have predicted. Certainly it was influenced by Titian and the work of the Venetian Renaissance, but its mode was aggressively modern. Its subject was the sexualized female, desirable and sometimes desiring, but whose ‘beauty ‘ was determined more by libidinal drives than by classical precedents. It would be difficult to find a place in nineteenth-century culture where the struggle between fear and desire was more acute than in the representation of the sexualized woman, but it was through that representation that both the ‘fleshly school of poetry ‘ and the ‘fleshly school of painting ‘ came into being.
Burne-Jones and the Aesthetic Body
Authors: Bullen J B
Published: November 2023

In The 1860s the only member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to perpetuate its original spirit was Holman Hunt. Rossetti disappeared from view, and, painting only on commission for private patrons, rarely showed his work at exhibitions. Under Rossetti ‘s influence, however, a second wave of Pre-Raphaelitism was developed in which Burne-Jones was the most prominent figure. Jones had met the first generation of Pre-Raphaelites in the late 1850s, had become friendly with Swinburne and Whistler. He had been taken up by Ruskin in the 1860s, and, though he had shown his work in London, he was, even in 1864, still ‘almost unknown to the public ‘.2 Meanwhile the challenge to orthodoxy shifted temporarily from painting to literature.
Introduction
Authors: Tate Trudi , Raitt Suzanne
Published: November 2023

In a curious poem published in 1917, Violet Hunt describes a kind of darkness which has descended during the Great War: It is all shiny and black, like bombazine or taffeta, Or the satin of my grandmother’s gown, that stood alone It was so thick; A screen between us and knowledge, That sometimes, when we are very good, gets on to the placards. Something stands between civilians and knowledge; a screen which Hunt likens to the surfaces of femininity: shiny cloth; a Victorian gown. The gown conceals forbidden knowledge from the viewer; and knowledge itself is figured as a female body, hidden and impenetrable. Yet the metaphor is even more complex, for the gown is remembered as empty, standing alone, supported by the weight of its fabric. Knowledge is figured as an absent female body; an empty space inside a woman’s gown. ‘Woman’ simultaneously represents an invisible body of knowledge, and the subject (the speaker of Hunt’s poem) prevented from knowing.
‘Contagious ecstasy’: May Sinclair’s War Journals
Authors: Raitt Suzanne
Published: November 2023

In Richard Aldington’s 1929 Death of a Hero, George Winterbourne sees troops returning from leave and muses: ‘These men were men ... They had been where no woman and no half-man had ever been, could endure to be.’ This notion that the front, where the ‘real’ business of war was carried out, was no place for a woman left many women feeling that they had no place in the war. Sandra Gilbert has suggested that women were liberated by the widespread absence of men from their domestic and working lives, although she does point out that as well as their ‘sexual glee’ women felt intense anxiety and guilt at having got what they wanted at so many men’s expense. But despite the government’s efforts to recast the roles of mother, wife, and indeed of ‘woman’ in the mould of war, women seem to have remained confused and uneasy, afraid of doing things wrong, but unsure how to do things right. For many women, especially older women who had no children to look after, and were beyond the age where they could be recruited for war service, the war heightened their feelings of uselessness. As Gilbert and Gubar see it, women felt curiously free, and so curiously unnecessary. Women like May Sinclair, already 51 when the war broke out, struggled to make a place for themselves in a world that was preoccupied with the vulnerability of young men, rather than of older women. Her war journals reveal in painful and awkward detail the shame of a middle-aged woman who sees in middle age her last chance at life.
Gertrude Stein and War
Authors: Gregory Elizabeth
Published: November 2023

It has been argued that the peculiar literary project with which Gertrude Stein’s name is typically associated involved a nonhierarchic utopian aspect. Sometimes described as cubist for its presentation of its objects from many angles at once, Stein’s semi-grammatical work (i.e. at Chomsky’s second level of grammaticality-not devoid of meaning but not fully clear either) is characterized as well by some combination of frequently repeated phrases, modulating more or less gradually over long spans of page, a glancing focus that often conveys the sense that a subject-matter exists without clarifying quite what it is, and a preference for present tense. Though the style varies over time and between texts, the large effect is an insistence on multiplicities of possible readings. In insisting so, this ‘Steinese’ undermines the notion of hierarchy implicit in the view that one may master a text’s meaning, and raises questions about hierarchies of all kinds. Stein’s language has also been linked to the Kristevan semiotic and understood to re-create through its rhythms and its play with sound the pleasures of vocal interaction within a mother-child dyad. Such an honouring of the pre-symbolic over mature language use has also been read as a challenge to standard hierarchies.
Modern English Usage
Authors: Baldick Chris
Published: November 2023

New Words, 1910–1940 The processes of change in early twentieth-century life are most commonly presented in terms of technological inventions such as those in motorized transport, aviation, and radio, or sometimes by reference to new theoretical models such as Relativity and Psychoanalysis. But there were innovations in the sphere of language as well. Although now scarcely remembered as an event of any cultural significance, the arrival of the crossword puzzle in 1924 may be seen as marking a new kind of relationship between the literate public and the vocabulary, orthography, and morphology of the English language. It started as a newspaper craze, fomented by the offer of cash prizes, but it soon established itself as a national institution, confirmed by the inauguration in 1930 of The Times crossword. By this time, crossword fiends were beginning to appear in fiction, too: Sidney Quarles in Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point (1928), and two nameless mariners in the opening chapter of Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies (1930), for example.
Modern Satire
Authors: Baldick Chris
Published: November 2023

Cyril Connolly observed in 1938 that ‘This is a satirical age and among the vast reading public the power of an artist to awaken ridicule has never been so great.’ There is a strong sense in which it was the ‘age’ itself that was satirical, not just its authors. The grim ironies of modern history provided enough mockery of human vanities, even before the literary satirist could get to work on them. Thomas Hardy shared the view that events themselves are the sharpest satirists, an assumption embodied in the title of his verse sequence ‘satires of Circumstance’ (1911). Of modern historical ironies, the most cruelly’satirical’ in its perceived implications was the Great War of 1914–18, an event whose moral devastations reverberated long after the Armistice. The War That Will End War (a slogan coined by H. G. Wells), the war that would be over by Christmas, it constituted in the eyes of many writers an unanswerable satire not only upon political blindness, military incompetence, journalistic dishonesty, and the English class system, but upon the higher ideals of European civilization itself.
A.E. Housman: The Nature Of His Poetry
Authors: Ricks Christopher
Published: November 2023

Housman thought that literary cnt1cs were even rarer than poets or saints, so he would not have been surprised that we are hard put to say why we like or dislike his poems. His admirers usually offer little more than pious generalities, and his detractors say ‘adolescent’—a word used by critics as different as Edmund Wilson, George Orwell, Cyril Connolly, R. P. Blackmur, and Conrad Aiken. There is an excellent annotated bibliography of early writings on Housman which is by R. W. Stallman, who not surprisingly found it necessary to include a section on that famous difficulty, ‘The Problem of Belief. ‘ After speaking of Housman’s pessimism, he summarised the critical groupings:
William Empson: The Images And The Story
Authors: Ricks Christopher
Published: November 2023

Empson might not disapprove of one’s pondering a poem of his in terms of its story, since he has always stuck up for story as one of the great things about literature. Obviously so, one would have hoped, for a novel or a play. Of Virginia Woolf, Empson remarked that ‘the impressionist method, the attempt to convey directly your own attitude to things, how you connect one thing with another, is in a sense fallacious; it tries to substitute for telling a story, as the main centre of interest, what is in fact one of the byproducts of telling a story’. Which drew him to Shakespeare: ‘Even those delicate interconnections on which the impressionist method depends ... need a story to make them intelligible, and even if Shakespeare (since I have dragged him in) could afford to abandon himself to these delicious correspondences he had first to get a strong and obvious story which would be effective on the stage.’
Stevie Smith: The Art Of Sinking In Poetry
Authors: Ricks Christopher
Published: November 2023

Fausse—na  ï ve: an odd turn, but Philip Larkin! devised it as a route into the world of Stevie Smith. All its quirks are right for this truly quirky poet: its feminizing, its Anglo—French, and its paradox. For the first question to ask about the poems of Stevie Smith is, can she possibly be as ingenuous as she sounds? An ingenue is of interest only if you can’t be entirely sure. A few critics raise the question and show that it need not be nailed down. If critics ‘portray her often as a na ï ve writer,’ says Michael Schmidt, ‘this reveals the success with which she projected the mock—innocence of her public image.’ 2 But her writing depends upon its being always in question to what degree her innocence is mock—innocence. She disliked ‘the false simple’ (which she associated with Nazism) as much as she liked ‘the childish delight in a daily use of colour and form, the naïvêtc that has in it something of innocence’. Not that innocence is a simple thing. In the words of ‘The Last Turn of the Screw’: ‘Some children are born innocent, some achieve it’.
Introduction
Authors: Mcgann Jerome
Published: November 2023

The words ‘sensibility’ and ‘sentiment’ name a momentous cultural shift whose terms were defined in the eighteenth century. The event all but founded the novel, and it produced an upheaval in the way poetry was conceived and written. Both romanticism and modernism organized themselves in relation to the traditions of sensibility and sentiment. So far as high culture is concerned, however, these traditions remain something of an embarrassment-at best a topic of academic interest, at worst a perceived threat to the practice of art.
Frances Greville’s ‘A Prayer for Indifference’
Authors: Mcgann Jerome
Published: November 2023

‘The most celebrated poem by a woman of the period’, the title promises (through both of its principal terms) a far more subdued performative work than we see in The Amourous Lady’s writing. Greville’s prayer is a reflective rather than a dramatistic action. None the less, the poem operates through the same logic of sensibility, and its passion, if less demonstrative, may appear all the more affecting for that reason.
Motherhood and the Self Unknown
Authors: Mcgann Jerome
Published: November 2023

Yearsley, Greville, and The Amourous Lady pursue love through a context of deprivation, and the literature of sensibility does largely function in a world assumed to be ‘fallen’. Yearsley’s Platonic remonstrance, however, suggests the possibility of a wholly uncorrupted realm, a glimpsed world of pure forms. Indeed, among the sub-genres of sensibility one does stand apart, trailing clouds of the glory of a condition of absolute purity. This is the literature of the child: ‘Infant Joy’, ‘The Lamb’, ‘The Idiot Boy’.
The Loss of Sentimental Poetry
Authors: Mcgann Jerome
Published: November 2023

‘For such loss ... abundant recompence’ (‘Tintern Abbey’, 88- 9): this formula governs a view of elegy now, apparently, become normative. Something works to redeem the harrowing logic of ultimate loss, perhaps even—as in certain Christian and Marxian mythoi—to transform it into splendour. In its lowest common denominator the formula traces out a dismal science of balanced books or capitalist growth. More impressive and even thrilling is the cancellation of loss executed through a general economy of gift-giving or potlatch. Of course ‘civilized’ cultures—witness the historical evolution of Christianity—have always tried to restrict the economy of wholesale sacrifice, to bring order and a measure of reasonableness to the sad, ecstatic, or spectacular stories of the deaths of kings.
Foreign Editions In English And Miscellaneous Printed Material
Authors: Kirkpatrick B J
Published: November 2023

In addition to the miscellaneous printed material listed below (E13-26), note should also be taken of: (1) the printed letter sending greetings to Henry James on his seventieth birthday, 15 April 1913, signed by Virginia Woolf and 241 others and now in the Berg Col lection, New York Public Library; (2) the printed letter sending greetings to Sigmund Freud on his eightieth birthday, 6 May 1936, signed by Virginia Woolf and 349 others and now in the Freud Museum, London; and (3) the tribute to Lady Ottoline Morrell pre pared by Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot which was published in Otto line Morrell: Life on the Grand Scale, by Miranda Seymour, Hodder & Stoughton, 1992, p. 484, which was rejected by Philip Morrell in favour of his own eulogy.
Tony Harrison the Playwright
Authors: Eyre Richard
Published: November 2023

Whenever the litany of names is invoked to justify an asser tion of the vigour of post-war playwrighting in Britain, there is one name that is consistently absent, and it is the one name that seems to me to justify the claim that there is an unbroken tra dition in the British theatre going back to the fifteenth century. The missing name, of course, is Tony Harrison, who is as prolific a writer for the theatre as, say, his contemporary and fellow native of Leeds, Alan Bennett. You could make compar isons between the two writers, and they would not be invidi ous ones. Both write about sex, class, and death, even if Alan’s mordant wit provides an opaque filter which makes these themes less conspicuous than Tony’s. They share a common contempt for the merely fashionable, and they are thoroughly demotic-both making idiosyncratic films for television. Popular without being populist, they are thoroughly accessible, and thoroughly and unapologetically elitist-if that means believing in the absolute values of good and bad art and refusing to talk down to people from the class you were borninto.
Persuasive Sounds: The Rhetoric Of Words And Music
Authors: Colvin Sarah
Published: November 2023

To treat opera and drama together in one study is to venture into extensive territories. But it is in the development of early opera that early modern stagecraft, with all of its rhetorical or persuasive aspirations, is pushed to its limits. Here we find another potent element working on the text and the audience’s senses: music.
Persuasive Laughter: Carnival, Theatre, And Control
Authors: Colvin Sarah
Published: November 2023

No study of outsiderdom and inversion in theatre could properly close without a consideration of comic drama and the role of that archetypal outsider, the fool. Comedy must also attract our attention because of its gendered position in the literary hierarchy: ‘Comedy occupies a position in the structure of traditional literary discourses which is precisely parallel to that of ‘female’ in gender constructs: comedy is the “different”, lesser, subordinate genre .. .’ It is in particular so-called ‘low’ comedy that occupies a subordinate position in literary theoretical thought. It has been widely assumed that farcical, carnivalesque comedy is inferior to what is sometimes called roman tic comedy.
‘Not Our Sort’: The Re-Formation of Middle-Class Identities
Authors: Humble Nicola
Published: November 2023

In the years after the First World War, the middle class became increasingly self-conscious. Its members began to question their own identity, the role of their class and its future in the nation.
Nature Conservation, Landscape Design, and Recreation: Voices From Within the Forestry Commission
Authors: Tsouvalis Judith
Published: November 2023

Terms chapter considers a side of the FC that raises questions about why conflicts about the flow country or ancient woodland ever arose. Here, an organization will be encountered that introduced National Forest Parks and seemed well aware of nature conservation issues; an organization that employed landscape designers to improve the layout of its plantations; an organization that encouraged access to its land and provided leisure facilities. This image of the FC glimpsed from its annual reports does not match with the one of the organization that was restructured in 1992 to make it more ‘user friendly’. Before trying to explain this discrepancy, it is necessary to consider what the FC had to say about nature conservation, landscape design, and recreation over the years.
John Palsgrave: Clerk, Royal Schoolmaster, and Chaplain
Authors: Stein Gabriele
Published: November 2023

Within the history of English dictionary-making John Palsgrave is the first lexicographer whose name is known. Dictionary-making involving English began with bilingual word lists. By the early fifteenth century these lists had assumed the scale and nature of dictionaries, and some have been preserved. The oldest are the Medulla grammatice and the Hortus vocabulorum. Of these two Latin-English dictionaries it is only the Hortus vocabulorum that was ever printed (between 1500 and 1532). The earliest English-Latin dictionaries are the Promptorium parvulorum and the Catholicon Anglicum, and again, only one of them was printed: the Promptorium parvulorum (between 1499 and 1528). For none of these four early lexicographical works has the compiler been identified.
The Word List
Authors: Stein Gabriele
Published: November 2023

In this chapter we shall study the word list in Palsgrave’s English-French dictionary. He himself never calls it a ‘dictionary’; he uses the terms ‘vocabular’, ‘vocabuler’, and ‘vocabulyst’ and characterizes it as the ‘frenche vocabular’, thus highlighting what he regarded as its most salient feature. The earliest date we have for the use of ‘dictionary’ in English is 1526,and we know that the first dictionary including English as one of the languages described is the Dictionary of Syr Thomas Elyot, published in 1538. In using ‘vocabular’, ‘vocabulyst’, Palsgrave strikes us as more factual than other earlier and later compilers of English word lists, who described their collections of words and phrases for want of a generic term metaphorically as a Medutla, a Promptorium, a Hortus vocabulorum, a Catholicon, an Abecedarium, a Thesaurus, a Manipulus vocabulorum, an Alvearie, a Sylva synonymon1m, a Bibliotheca, or simply a Worlde of Words (see Stein 1985a).
Literary Citations
Authors: Stein Gabriele
Published: November 2023

As he was not a native speaker of French, Palsgrave tells us in Lesclarcissement de la langue francoyse which authors writing in French he had read to give his work the necessary linguistic authority. There is no corresponding list of authors writing in English. Yet his English-French dictionary provides us with some evidence that his reading programme also embraced English literary texts. In more than 100 cases a headword is identified as occurring in the works of either Geoffrey Chaucer or John Lydgate. This confirms the view expressed earlier when discussing his list of adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions: when he compiled his word list, Palsgrave was not only using material from his own knowledge as a native speaker and from reference sources; he also added lexical items studiously collected from his own reading of authentic English texts.
Language Maintenance and Language Shift as Strategies of Social Reproduction
Authors: Riagáin Pádraigó
Published: November 2023

This chapter presents a study of the social pattern of Irish/English bilingualism in the area of the southwestern peninsula of An Daingean which is officially defined as an Irish-speaking or Gaeltacht area. (The boundaries of this Gaeltacht area have, in fact, been revised on a number of occasions since 1926. The study area corresponds to the Gaeltacht as defined in the most recent boundary revision in 1974, although in the course of the analysis note is also taken of the earlier designations.) The study focuses on the extent to which Irish is used in the home and the community and the social, spatial, and temporal variations in these patterns. Other language-related variables-ability to speak Irish, attitudes towards Irish and towards state policies for Irish-are also considered, but their inclusion here is primarily to assist in understanding the incidence and extent of social use of Irish in the study area. The analytical model stresses the importance for the maintenance of Irish of the territorial organization of the local community and the relationship of this to the wider national and international economy. The ‘territorial organization’ of communities refers to the daily patterns of social interaction as members of the community move between home, work-place, school, shop, church, and other services, and also the more extensive movements of people and capital, including all forms of migration and tourism. These patterns of interaction are, of course, subject to change as the area responds to the opportunities and pressures of its external environment. From the viewpoint of language maintenance a crucial question concerns the way socio-economic changes affect social network boundaries, or in more formal sociological terms, the degree to which Irish-speaking networks are open or closed. Depending on the relative number and social characteristics of the participants entering or leaving social networks, these processes have a cumulative effect on language patterns.
Revival or Survival?
Authors: Riagáin Pádraigó
Published: November 2023

There is a good deal of confusion about the exact character and objective of Ireland’s language policy. This is in no small measure due to the enduring tendency, in popular and academic discourse alike, to refer to the policy as the ‘Irish Language Revival’. As informed commentators have frequently pointed out, Ireland cannot, strictly speaking, be included among the examples of ‘pure’ language revival (e.g. Paulston, Chee Chen, and Connerty 1993, Bentahila and Davies 1993). The Irish language was not extinct at the time Ireland became independent, but was spoken by a minority of the population in western areas. There are other confusions. ‘Language Revival’ has often been taken to mean the displacement of English by Irish among the national population (0 Cuiv 1969: 130). Whatever may have been the views of individual politicians or spokespersons of the language movement, the constitutional and legislative provisions made for Irish in the 1920s and 1930s do not suggest that anything other than the establishment of a bilingual state was ever envisaged. The first Constitution of Ireland in 1922, and all subsequent revisions, recognized both English and Irish as official languages of the state.
Truth, Natural Law, and Ethical Theory
Authors: Stout Jeffrey
Published: November 2023

Human beings, being less than perfect in knowledge and virtue, construct imperfect moral codes. The beliefs their codes embody, though imposed by the powerful or accepted by the majority, are all too often untrue. We therefore honour women and men who, in the name of moral truth, have risked their lives in disobedience. Unfortunately, much of what they say in their own defence is hard to believe.
Eleatic Arguments
Authors: Curd Patricia
Published: November 2023

Diogenes of Apollonia, often called ‘the last pre-Socratic’, began his book with these words: ‘It seems to me that anyone beginning any account ought to make the starting-point [or principle) indisputable (chreon einai ten archen anamphisbeteton) and the explanation simple and dignified’ (64B1 ). 1 Having no context for the fragment, and not knowing how it continued, we do not know if Diogenes went on to explain his requirement of indisputability.2 Did he mean that first principles must be either self-evident or capable of being demonstrated (and thus placed beyond dispute)? Or did he perhaps mean that the author of a theory must give whatever arguments are needed to place the first principle beyond dispute? It seems that this latter is what Diogenes meant, for he goes on, in fragments 2–5, to argue for his own first principle, air. These fragments appear in Simplicius’s commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, and Simplicius tells us that B2 appeared ‘immediately after the introduction’ (although it is not known if the introduction included more than fragment r). Fragment 2 is an argument that the first principle must be one, that ‘all the things that are, are alterations of the same thing and are the same thing’. Diogenes claims that ‘this is very clear’ (kai touto eudelon), thus apparently satisfying his criterion for indisputability laid down in B1; but he nevertheless goes on to provide an argument that purports to demonstrate that ‘all things are the same thing’. The argument is a reductio with a suppressed premiss: if each thing that is had a nature peculiar to itself (idia phusis), there would be no mixing, no benefit or harm from one thing to another, no growth for plants, no animals, or anything else.
Plato’s Apologies and Socrates in the Theaetetus
Authors: Long A A
Published: November 2023

My purpose in this essay is to approach Plato’s philosophical methodology by way of questions concerning his representation of Socrates, especially in the Theaetetus.1 It will be widely agreed, l assume, that this dialogue in its transmitted form is one of the last works in which Plato assigns the central role to Socrates. Stylometry and content suggest for it a date of composition close to the Parmenides and Phaedrus and certainly prior to the Sophist.2 As a working hypothesis, I begin by assuming, like many scholars, that Plato wrote the Theaetetus after the Parmenides (which is probably alluded to at Tht. r83e) and Phaedrus. If the argument I will develop has force, it should provide independent support for this assumption.
Introduction
Authors: Millican Peter
Published: November 2023

This is the first of two volumes of essays in commemoration of Alan Turing. It is centred on the continuing discussion of his classic contributions to the theory of artificial intelligence and computer science, and in particular, the three most fundamental and seminal ideas universally associated with his name: the Turing Test, the Turing machine, and the Church-Turing thesis.
A Grammar-Based Approach to Common-Sense Reasoning
Authors: Mott Peter
Published: November 2023

There is at present a paradigm—or at least an almost paradigm for the modelling of common—sense inference. It goes as follows. First, you translate an English sentence into a formal language, then you do inference using the rules and axioms of that system, then you translate back into English. There is a convenient division of labour here. Computational linguists will focus their concerns primarily on syntax. But they will, at least often, systematically associate logical formulae with their parsed sentences (e.g. Gazdar et al., 1985; Pereira and Warren, 1980). In fact, from a computer science perspective, the grammars these linguists produce are compilers from English into logic. But the syntacticians do not do anything with their logic. That is left to philosophers and some AI workers concerned with common-sense inference. The philosophers (e.g. Cresswell, 19 85; Lewis, 1970) use these logics to address the sort of questions concerning reference, selfhood, and the propositional attitudes which interest them. The AI-workers (e.g. McCarthy, 1986; McDermott and Doyle, 1980) use them in an attempt to represent common-sense reasoning.