Oxbow Spring 2013.pdf - Oxbow Books

Childhood as
Memory, Myth
and Metaphor
Proust, Beckett, and
Bourgeois
Catherine Crimp (Author)
Dissonance in
the Republic of
Letters
The Querelle des
Gluckistes et des
Piccinnistes
Mark Darlow (Author)
A fascination with childhood unites the artist Louise Bourgeois
(1911–2010) and the writers Samuel Beckett (1906–89) and
Marcel Proust (1871–1922). But while many commentators
have traced their childhood images back to memories of lived
experiences, there is more to their mythologies of childhood
that waits to be explored. The haunting child figures of
Bourgeois, Beckett and Proust echo each other as they show
how imagining origins — for a life, for a work of art — involves
paradoxes that test the limits of our forms of expression. Art
meets literature, profusion meets concision, French meets
English, and images of childhood reveal new insights in this
encounter between three great figures of twentieth- and
twenty-first-century culture.
9781907975394, £45.00, January 2013
HB, 200p, Legenda Main Series, Legenda
Eighteenth-century French cultural life was often
characterised by quarrels, and the arrival of Viennese
composer Christoph Willibald Gluck in Paris in 1774 was
no exception, sparking a five-year pamphlet and press
controversy which featured a rival Neapolitan composer,
Niccolò Piccinni. However, the controversy was about far
more than French operatic reform. A consideration of
cultural politics in 1770s Paris shows that a range of issues
were at stake: court versus urban taste as the proper judge
of music, whether amateurs or specialists should have the
right to speak of opera, whether the epic or the tragic mode
is more suited for drama reform, and even: why should the
public argue about opera at all?
9781907975547, £45.00, January 2013
HB, 240p, Legenda Main Series, Legenda
Method and
Variation
Narrative in Early
Modern French
Thought
Emma Gilby (Editor); Paul
White (Editor)
Goethe’s
Poetry and the
Philosophy of
Nature
Gott und Welt
1798–1827
Regina Sachers (Author)
Language & Literature
French philosophical and scientific writers of the early
modern period made various use of forms of narrative
language that aims to tell a story in their texts. Equally,
authors of fiction often sought to appropriate the
language and tools of philosophical and scientific
investigation. The contributions in this collection, from
some of the most distinguished and exciting scholars
working in French Studies today, aim to bring into
question oppositional relationships between terms
such as ‘philosophy’ and ‘fiction’ when these are
applied to early modern texts. They consider authors
as diverse as Montaigne, Descartes, La Rochefoucauld,
Mme de Villedieu and Mme de Lafayette.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, philosophy
and theology come under increasing pressure owing to
the emergence of the modern sciences. The collection
Gott und Welt is Goethe’s poetic contribution to this
conflict, in which an alternative to orthodox Christianity
was being sought. Following the collection’s various stages
of composition and publication, this study offers new
readings of some of Goethe’s best known poems: Die
Metamorphose der Pflanzen, Dauer im Wechsel, Urworte.
Orphisch and Wiederfinden. Sachers shows that Gott und
Welt is the long poem on nature which Goethe attempted
to write for the last third of his life. As such it represents
Goethe’s unique answers to the intellectual challenges
posed by the dawning age of science.
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9781907975363, £45.00, January 2013
HB, 130p, Legenda Main Series, Legenda
9781907747977, £45.00, January 2013
HB, Legenda Main Series, Legenda