Academic literature on the topic 'Fanny Reading'

Abstract Though there has been recent interest in how Jane Austen’s faith influenced her novels, scholars have generally looked to her reading in philosophy and sermons, her spiritual expression, or her Anglicanism, and have neglected the more direct influence of the Bible. Yet judging from Austen’s lifelong church attendance and her reading of the Book of Common Prayer, we can conclude that she would have heard the Psalms read entirely through once every month of her forty-one years. This paper explores the resemblance between the psalmists and Fanny Price in terms of their shared experience of exile, their patterns of lament and reminder, their long wait for deliverance, and their final homecoming. Comparing Fanny Price’s character to the psalmists recasts her as a heroine in the Hebrew tradition, offering a new understanding of her passivity and suggesting that her author was more influenced by scriptural patterns than has been heretofore understood.

This essay reassesses Kate O'Brien's The Flower of May, and argues that the novel presents as close to a conclusion as practicable to the themes O'Brien worked on throughout her fiction – the freedom to choose one's path in life, the negotiation of cultural, ethical and familial mores, as well as the importance of education for women. A close reading of the text suggests that the mother-daughter relationship symbolizes the rejection by the heroine, Fanny Morrow, of her mother Julia, who represents Mother Ireland, its customs and conventions, towards the fulfilment of Fanny's ambition for independence through education. This aspiration is achieved by Julia's death, which leaves Fanny free to live her life on her own terms, outside the constraints of familial bonds. Intertwined with the unfolding of the narrative is the recurring motif of the lighthouse, with its haunting presence during key moments of the plot, which is utilized as a symbol of nation, as well as a means of framing the diverging paths of mother and daughter.

In my experience, everyone among my acquaintances, friends, family members, students and colleagues who has encountered Fanny Hensel's ‘Song without Words’ [Song for Piano] op. 8, no. 1 in B minor, has recognized its special character – perhaps responding above all to its sense of ‘multum in parvo’, or ‘much in a small space’. This article offers some reflections on what it is that makes this piece so special and gives it this particular effect. As well as paying attention to the patterns, relationships and textures created by the notes, it seeks to suggest that one way of ‘reading’ the music may lie in its author's personality and circumstances.

This essay reconsiders some critically established ‘germs’ for Henry James’s “The Death of the Lion” (1894), traced back to the 1893 demise of Guy de Maupassant and to the latter’s only visit to England in the summer of 1886. On that occasion, Maupassant was ‘chaperoned’ by his American friend Blanche Roosevelt, a well-known literary journalist in the London and Paris circles. The unexplored connection with Roosevelt invites a new reading which gives prominence to the American woman character in the tale (Fanny Hurter) and unveils an international subtheme within it. In light of such a reading, as well as of authoritative studies which have analyzed “The Death of the Lion” against the rise of modern literary journalism, I will also re-examine the role of the first-person narrator, an unnamed ‘repented’ literary journalist, in thwarting the possible relation between Neil Paraday and his American admirer.

This essay offers a first critical reading of American author Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson’s short story “The Warlock’s Shadow” (1886), asserting that the tale appropriates historical traumas in order to navigate, and transgress, boundaries of genre and gender. The strangeness of the text’s Central Californian setting, to the narrator, precipitates a series of Gothic metamorphoses, and “The Warlock’s Shadow” engages with this transformation via a concept that this essay defines as the “Californian Uncanny”. The latter framework is a result of the specific, layered indigenous and colonial identities of post-Gold Rush California coming into contact with the unstable subjectivities of the Gothic genre. “The Warlock’s Shadow” manifests the Californian Uncanny primarily through the relationship between the home, the environment, and the “unassimilable” inhabitant. Stevenson’s text illustrates, through these images, the ways in which late-nineteenth-century American Gothic fiction has allowed the white feminine subject to negotiate her own identity, complicating the binary distinctions between Self and Other which underpin American colonialism both internally and externally. The phenomenon of the Californian Uncanny in “The Warlock’s Shadow” reflects these gendered and geographical anxieties of American identity, confronting the ghosts of the nation’s westernmost region.

Background. Numerous research conferences and scholarly papers show increased interest in the creativity of German composer, pianist and singer of the 19th century Fanny Hensel-Mendelssohn. What is particularly noticeable is that her life and creativity are subject of non-scholarly discussion. Writers of biographical works are profoundly interested in the personality of this talented artist, as it gives them material for the discussion of a whole range of issues, in particular those pertaining to the phenomena of female creativity, new concepts of music and history of music with emphasis on its communicative character, correlation between music and gender, establishment of autobiographical character of musical creativity, expression and realization of female creativity under conditions of burgher society. Additional attention is paid to family constellations: Robert and Clara Schumann, brother and sister Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy and Fanny Hensel-Mendelssohn. A very close relationship between Felix Mendelssohn and Fanny HenselMendelssohn opens a new perspective on the dialogical history of music, i. e. the reconstruction of music pieces based on close personal and critical contact in the Mendelssohn family. All these ideas, which researchers started articulating and discussing only recently, found their artistic expression in the biographical novel “Dear Fenchel! The Life of Fanny Hensel-Mendelssohn in Etudes and Intermezzi” («Liebste Fenchel! Das Leben der Fanny Hensel-Mendelssohn in Etüden und Intermezzi», 2011) by the German writer Peter Härtling (1933–2017). Peter Härtling was attracted to the image of Fanny Hensel primarily because she was working in the Romantic aesthetics, which the writer considered the backbone of his own creativity. While working on the novel about Fanny Hensel, Peter Härtling was constantly reading her diaries and listening to her music as well as the music by her brother Felix Mendelssohn. He discovered “a fascinating composer” who was creating music “bravely” through improvisation, even more so, who improvised her own life in a similar fashion. Her “courageous steps” into “female reality” struck the biography writer. Objectives. The research aims at studying the literary image of Fanny Hensel using the ideas of contemporary music scholars regarding creativity of this still little researched artist. Literary reflection of the life and creativity of musician based on combination of fiction and real life is a productive addition to her creative image. Methods. Since the research is centered on the image of a female composer, in many respects it is following the theoretical premises of music gender studies. The complexity of literary recreation to the personality and creativity of composer in the novel was required the sophisticated narrative situation and structure, that justifies the use of narratology as a method of literary criticism’ analysis. Results. Peter Härtling is a well-known master of biographical novel, who has his own creative concept of re-construction the life story of famous artists. When creating a biographical novel, the writer walks on the verge of reality and fiction, rediscovering and creating. The artistic element serves the purpose of amplification and image-creation; it helps to reveal distinctive properties, characteristics and elements of personality of the biographic novel hero. Gaps in documented materials help the narrator behave freely, give a chance for open associations and subjective vision. When outlining the personality lineaments, the narrator follows chronology of the most important events. Yet, plot development in an autobiographical novel is based on separate motifs. Certain life stages and events of a person’s life are depicted in detail in specific chapters and are shown more accurately within the general plot. By running ahead and looking back, the narrator makes it clear that he is above the narrative situation and arranges the depicted events according to the principle of their development. The narrator plays the role of an accompanying of a person portrayed, helping the writer approach to latter in order to understand him. Peter Härtling defines the key narrative principle in the following way: the narration is centered on the relationship of the talented brother and sister, as well as the motives of a mothering care and self-assertion, which are creating the backdrop for the biography of Fanny Mendelssohn. As such, we can see the ways that helped a talented young woman stand against her competitor-brother and get out of his shadow. The author claims that since childhood, the brother and the sister got along with the help of music and it was music that created a tie between them. The novel pays close attention to their discussions of music and the Sunday concerts, which took place at their house. As it is known from letters, it was very important for Felix Mendelssohn to include music into private communication forms. Researchers emphasizes that it made hard for him to be involved in social processes, in which such form of communication was impossible. Based on what Felix Mendelssohn himself said, it is possible to conclude that he was making an opposition between private musical communication as “the world of music” and social music life “as the world of musicians”. Fanny Hensel was not the embodiment of “detached musical practice” of autonomous art for him; on contrary, her creativity was directly linked to real life. Inside the bourgeois home and amid “private circulation of texts”, Fanny Hensel’s music was directly connected to communication, holidays and family rituals, in which the roles of music performer and music listener were “not cemented”, presupposing active inclusion of “amateurs” into music. Private musical practice meant the successful musical communication, the direct communication in music, which was not possible in anonymous publicness. Composer individuality had a chance of growing without being stripped of meaning and understanding. Inside the burgher house and within her immediate circle, Fanny Hensel was the symbol of “illusion of non-detached music”. Peter Härtling attests to autobiographical character of Fanny Hensel’s musical writing. Conclusions. Peter Härtling’s novel shows a cultural change, which stipulated an extended understanding of music as a dynamic process of human activity in a specific, historically varied cultural field. In this respect, Fanny Hensel’s literary portrait touches upon important aspects of female music creativity, actualizing its achievements in contemporary cultural space. Approaching the talented artist in literature is a special combination of art and life, fictitious and real, past and present.

The nineteenth-century theatre saw the rise of the outspoken, intelligent leading lady. In a period in which actors were just shedding their status as second-class citizens, and women still were second-class citizens in society as a whole, three actresses established themselves as major interpreters of Shakespeare. Fanny Kemble, Helena Faucit Martin, and Ellen Terry had the double advantage of rising to the top of their profession and of being highly articulate writers as well, leaving records of their thoughts about acting and about the playwright who inspired them. This reading of their letters, memoirs, and criticism suggests answers to several questions: What do the actresses notice about Shakespeare's plays? How do their views relate to those of the literary critics of the time? And finally, do they ever consult formal scholarship when preparing for a role?

This article makes the case for reading Zola’s protagonists Laurent and Thérèse as literary foils for one of the founding fathers of the experimental method, namely the physiologist Claude Bernard, and his wife, Fanny Martin. Drawing more particularly on elements from Bernard’s and Martin’s lives, as well as Bernard’s scientific writings, the article shows that Zola ‘performs’ two grueling experiments in the aforementioned novel: the first one, initiated by the author himself, results in the death of three protagonists and the paralysis of the fourth one; the second experiment, initiated by Laurent, reveals that the latter’s evaluation of Thérèse and his ensuing hypothesis are seriously flawed. In fact, Laurent’s gaze is marred by his tendency to ‘dirty’ nature (‘salir la nature,’ to borrow Zola’s expression), and his experiment doesn’t turn out the way he had originally planned, as both lovers turned murderers end up committing suicide together. This article thus argues that, in Thérèse Raquin, Zola resorts to critical posturing as a vivisector in a text that can be read as a revenge narrative which gestures towards the possibility for vivisectors to be ‘redeemed’ as individuals made fully capable of feeling compassion for their objects through angelic intervention.

This thesis is the biographical study of the ‘transnational’ life of Dr. Fanny Reading (1884-1974). Dr Reading came to live in the Ballarat area c. 1888 when she was four years old. Originally she was born in Karelitz near Minsk, Russia as Zipporah Rubinovitch. The thesis tells the story of her transformation and also the story of her family members because they were a close-knit orthodox Jewish family. Reading’s biography is of a migrant woman who belonged to a persecuted minority group, and who through force of character rose above the challenging circumstances of her birth. It serves to redress the fact that historically she has been overlooked. It confirms that at a grassroots level she mobilised the Jewish women of Australia and was a significant Jewish leader. As a transnational figure of considerable stature, Reading’s biography contains themes of place, class, gender, ethnicity and diaspora that are woven throughout the thesis. It covers her early childhood and adolescence in Ballarat, then her move to Melbourne early in the twentieth century where she became involved in Jewish youth activities and taught Hebrew at the St Kilda Jewish Congregation. The family name was changed to Reading about 1919. Reading entered the University of Melbourne firstly to study music and then medicine (M.B., B.S.1922.) After graduation, she went into general practice with her eldest brother, who was also a doctor, in Sydney. Inspired by a Zionist emissary Bella Pevsner, Reading founded the Council of Jewish Women in 1923. This organisation became the National Council of Jewish Women in 1929. Reading had a keen interest in the health and education of women and girls, the Hebrew language and Israel. She was held in high regard in both the Jewish and non-Jewish communities and received an MBE in 1961.
Doctor of Philosophy

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The subject of this study is the self-theorization in the novel Fanny Owen (1979) by Portuguese writer Agustina Bessa-Luís. The self-theorization occurs when literature looks at itself in a movement of self-reflexivity. Fanny Owen herself is entirely a self-theorization exercise. Her work is a fictional treatment of biographical facts related to historical personalities – mainly to the writer Camilo Castelo Branco, to his friend José Augusto Pinto de Magalhães, and to Fanny Owen, daughter of the British Colonel Hugh Owen , who had a leading role in the Portuguese Civil War (1828 -1834) . These three characters are involved in a love triangle. The narrative presents as a background the cultural context dominated by the Romantic movement, which has notable influence on the characters, especially on Fanny and Jose Augusto, readers of literature – mainly of Lord Byron. Given the importance that the theme of the literature appears in Fanny Owen, it seemed appropriate to allocate it in the subgenre "novel of reading", concept created by German theorist Volker Rollof. The novel of reading is that work whose reading of literature by its characters featured prominently in the plot. Such a condition of the work herein studied favors our approach of the self-theorization theme, since this category of novels, when addressing the relationship between reader and literature reading, necessarily establishes a discussion on the literary phenomenon. However, self-theorization also appears at other levels in this novel. It occurs through the narrator, who at several moments uses strategies in an attempt to be confused with the empirical author and that, moreover, mind-wanders about the art of writing. It also occurs when it portrays the writer Camilo Castelo Branco as a writer in training. Chapter I addresses specifically the self-theorization theme and reflections supported by theoretical contributions from Jonathan Culler, Antoine Compagnon, David Lodge, Umberto Eco, Lelia Pereira Duarte and Karin Volobuef. In Chapter II, it begins the study of the novel Fanny Owen discussing its main themes: the romantic culture, which appears portrayed in panorama along the plot, and the love triangle, which I analyze in accordance with the ideas of Denis de Rougemont and René Girard. The third chapter deals specifically with the self-theoretical mechanisms in the novel Fanny Owen.
O presente trabalho tem como tema a autoteorização no romance Fanny Owen (1979), da escritora portuguesa Agustina Bessa-Luís. A autoteorização ocorre quando a literatura volta o olhar sobre si mesma, num movimento de autorreflexividade. Fanny Owen é integralmente um exercício de autoteorização. A obra dá tratamento ficcional a fatos biográficos relacionados a personalidades históricas – principalmente o escritor Camilo Castelo Branco, seu amigo José Augusto Pinto de Magalhães, e Fanny Owen, filha do coronel inglês Hugh Owen, o qual teve destacado papel na Guerra Civil Portuguesa (1828-1834). Temos então estes três personagens envolvidos num triângulo amoroso. A narrativa apresenta como pano de fundo o contexto cultural dominado pelo movimento romântico, que tem notável influência nos personagens, principalmente em Fanny e José Augusto, leitores de literatura – sobretudo, de Lord Byron. Dada a importância com que o tema da literatura aparece em Fanny Owen, pareceu-me cabível alocá-lo no subgênero ―romance de leitura‖, conceito criado pelo teórico alemão Volker Rollof. O romance de leitura é a obra em que a leitura de literatura pelos personagens aparece com destaque na trama. Tal condição da obra ora estudada oportuniza a abordagem do tema da autoteorização, já que tal categoria de romances, ao tratar da relação entre leitor e leitura de literatura, estabelece necessariamente uma discussão sobre o fenômeno literário. No entanto, a autoteorização aparece também em outros níveis neste romance. Ocorre através do narrador, que em diversos momentos lança mão de estratégias na tentativa de ser confundido com o autor empírico e que, além disso, é dado a divagações sobre a arte da escrita. Ocorre também na medida em que retrata o escritor Camilo Castelo Branco como escritor em formação. O capítulo I aborda especificamente a autoteorização e conta com reflexões amparadas pelos aportes teóricos de Jonathan Culler, Antoine Compagnon, David Lodge, Umberto Eco, Lelia Pereira Duarte e Karin Volobuef. No capítulo II, começo o estudo do romance Fanny Owen, discutindo seus temas principais: a cultura romântica, a qual aparece retratada em panorama ao longo do enredo, e o triângulo amoroso, que analiso segundo as ideias de Denis de Rougemont e René Girard. O terceiro capítulo trata especificamente dos mecanismos autoteorizantes em Fanny Owen.

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the impact of Same-Language Subtitles (SLS) on the subject-specific comprehension and the academic literacy levels of EAL students on the Vaal Triangle Campus of North-West University (NWU). Essentially, the study aimed to determine whether exposing students studying through English as an Additional Language (EAL) to subtitled lectures (live or recorded lectures) would help improve their comprehension of the academic content as well as their receptive academic literacy skills, compared to students who were not exposed to subtitled lectures. This study stems from the identification of an academic performance-related issue on the Vaal Triangle Campus of NWU. Indeed, campus statistics show that the throughput rate of EAL students remains low, and that these students‟ academic literacy levels are inadequate. In other words, EAL students on this campus are underachieving and seem to have difficulties in mastering academic English. Based on various studies that showed SLS to be a valuable tool in terms of learning and academic literacy, this study proposed to introduce SLS (both live via respeaking and offline) in the university classroom as a learning aid, thus optimising the time students spend in lectures. Very little information was available in South Africa on the impact of SLS on the subject-specific comprehension of EAL students in a tertiary academic context. Furthermore, it had been anticipated that a certain number of technical constraints were likely to be encountered during the empirical investigation. These two factors made it difficult to predict what other factors could influence the outcome of the study. As a result, the study was based on the principle of Action Research, a research method characterised by the fact that the research is carried out in as many cycles as may be necessary in order to achieve the optimal conditions for a specific intervention. Three cycles were necessary to reach the optimal design of the present study so that a confident conclusion could be made regarding the impact of SLS on comprehension and academic literacy. For each cycle, the intervention was carried out over an academic semester. In the first cycle, a test group composed of EAL first-year Economics students was exposed to live SLS via respeaking during class, while a control group (also composed of EAL first-year Economics students) attended the same class at a different time, without SLS. In the second cycle, the live SLS via respeaking were replaced with offline SLS. The intervention was taken out of the regular classes and was carried out in the context of practical revision classes scheduled specifically for the purpose of the intervention. The test group viewed subtitled videos of lectures, while the control group viewed videos without subtitles. After each viewing, all participants were required to complete a short comprehension test. This cycle was also conducted in first-year Economics. The basic design of the third cycle was similar to that of the second cycle, but for the fact that the intervention took place in the context of a Psychology module, which, unlike the Economics module, was taught without the lecturer making use of slides. After these three research cycles were completed, it could be concluded that offline SLS indeed have a positive impact on the subject-specific comprehension and the receptive academic literacy skills of EAL students in a tertiary academic context. This conclusion was supported by the following findings: 1. The first research cycle pointed towards a slight, but statistically insignificant benefit in terms of both comprehension and academic literacy. However, at this stage of the empirical investigation, the technical constraints made it difficult to draw a precise conclusion in that respect. 2. In the second research cycle, the SLS seem to have had a significant impact on the receptive academic literacy skills of the test group, compared to the control group. However, no such impact could be noted in terms of subject-specific comprehension. This was attributed to the presence of a confounding variable, namely slides used during the lectures. This once more made it impossible to draw a confident conclusion regarding the impact of SLS on comprehension. 3. The third research cycle made a more confident conclusion regarding the impact of SLS on subject-specific comprehension possible. Indeed, the results of the statistical analyses show that the test group performed significantly better in their semester test (covering the work done in all the recorded lectures) than the control group, which was not exposed to any videos at all. On the basis of these findings, it was concluded that SLS in their offline form have a positive impact on the subject-specific comprehension and the receptive academic literacy skills of EAL students in a tertiary academic context, specifically if the students are given sufficient time to get used to the mode. This study seems to indicate that the benefits of SLS for comprehension can be recorded provided that students are exposed to the intervention over a longer period of time. However, there may be further scope for refinement as far as this study is concerned. It is therefore important that the topic be investigated further.
MA, Language Practice, North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2012

This paper aims to examine the heteronormativity that is present in John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga. This is achieved by performing a queer reading of the text with the help of Swedish Queer theorists Fanny Ambjörnsson and Tiina Rosenberg. I study the norm and how it is enforced by law, society and family. To get a complete image of the heteronormativity I also need to analyze the gender presented in the saga. For that task I use Judith Butler’s definitions of gender identity and the heterosexual matrix. I conclude that there is only a slight gender variation in the saga, mostly concerning the woman. Meanwhile the norms are broken repeatedly by different people and for different reasons. Generally all the non-normative behavior that is out of the public eye gets included and silenced by the family who acts as the norm.
Den här uppsatsen behandlar genus och heteronormativitet i romansviten Forsytesagan, hur dessa tar sig uttryck och vilken inverkan de har på romanfigurerna. Detta görs genom en queerläsning fokuserad på vad som sägs och än mer inte sägs i sagan. Det som analyseras är relationerna mellan människor, kraven som ställs på dem och deras begär till makt över egendom och över varandra. Vidare diskuteras hur heteronormen förändras under romanens gång, hur romanfigurerna bär sig åt för att hålla sig inom normen och vad som händer med dem som bryter mot normen. Slutsatsen blir att sagan behandlar förvånansvärt många frågor som än idag är aktuella, vissa av dem inlindade för att kunna tas upp i en sekelskiftsroman. Dessutom visas hur både genus och heteronorm förändrats under romanens gång, både i samhället i stort och inom familjen. Inte minst ges exempel på hur familjen agerar som norm och inkluderar alla avvikelser så länge som dessa sköts privat.

Between 1850 and 1920, readings of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream by women took place in conjunction with concerts of Felix Mendelssohn’s incidental music, popularized by actress Fanny Kemble. The practice responsed to criticism of the physicality of theatrical stagings and the ability of Mendelssohn’s music to depict extramusical content. Female elocutionists were considered ideal performers due to the depiction of fairies as female and in order to render Shakespeare’s pure poetry stripped of theatrical excess. The combination of Shakespeare and Mendelssohn represented the highest level of elocutionary art. In reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream, elocutionists became more voice than body, and the fairy elements were transmitted through Mendelssohn’s magical music, mediating the problem of the female body displayed on the stage.

AbstractIn this chapter the most famous writer of (female) affective individualism, Jane Austen, and her canonical third published novel Mansfield Park featuring her supposedly most unpopular heroine Fanny Price is juxtaposed with orator Robert Wedderburn’s much more obscure pamphlet The Horrors of Slavery. The chapter also revisits Edward Said’s famous theory of counterpoint in his reading of Austen and proposes instead a focus on entanglement. By contrasting the two texts and their relation to the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, readers get a better understanding of how writers used the affective means of prose writing to introduce more resistant entangled tonalities of familial feeling. Austen presents wilful female subjectivity in a family that invested in slavery and Wedderburn, the unruly planter son, claims familiarity with both his enslaved mother and his slave-owning father, challenging the formula of the “horrors of slavery”. Via internal focalization and incendiary rhetoric respectively both texts tonally also create a more intimate familiarity with their readers. They thus aesthetically resist writing conventions and introduce more ambivalent nuance: pushing the limits of the genre of the country-house novel in Austen and refuting the demure tone of abolitionist writing in Wedderburn.

In an extension of Stephen Rodgers’s efforts to turn “an analytical lens” on Fanny Hensel, this chapter focuses on selected Hensel settings whose texts have also inspired other composers: “Verlust” after Heine (“Und wüssten’s die Blumen”), also set by Robert Schumann and Robert Franz; “Frühling” (Eichendorff) with Schumann’s and Curschmann’s “Frühlingsnacht” as companions; and “Du bist die Ruh” (Rückert), also set by Schubert (and many others). In order to avoid comparing stylistically incompatible settings, the selection has been limited to Lieder between ca. 1825 and ca. 1850. Taking stock of Hensel’s interpretations and comparing them with those of other composers will allow musicologists and music theorists to assess her place in the history of the Lied in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Chapter two reassesses the conservatism of Jane Austen’s 1814 novel, Mansfield Park. It argues that we have misunderstood the novel by reading it in relation to the late eighteenth-century philosophy of Edmund Burke and socially conservative novelists like Jane West when, in fact, Mansfield Park is governed by a much older of social organization—the manor—not based on the liberal assumption of possessive individualism. Seeing the novel through the lens of the manor, the chapter argues, helps explain many of its most perplexing and difficult features: among them, the meekness of Fanny Price; the dissatisfactions of its ending; and the often distant or impersonal strategies of narration.

Nikolaus Lenau (1802–1850) is often described as Germany’s greatest poet of Weltschmerz. In his poetry, Lenau steadily invoked Nature and, in particular, the figure of the forest (der Wald), as both a reflection and amplification of his prevailing poetic mood. Fanny Hensel found inspiration in Lenau’s poetry toward the end of her life, setting seven of his poems in the 1840s. This chapter offers close readings of six of those settings, grouped into those that deploy forest imagery in varying degrees (“Vorwurf,” “Kommen und Scheiden,” and “Traurige Wege”) and those that describe or address the evening (“Bitte” and “Abendbild”). Throughout, the emphasis will be on Hensel’s harmonic, melodic, rhythmic, and textural strategies for capturing and coloring Lenau’s merger of nature and melancholy.

This chapter traces the progress towards publication of Keats’s collection which eventually appeared in 1820, its title page reading, ‘LAMIA, ISABELLA, THE EVE OF ST AGNES, AND OTHER POEMS. | BY JOHN KEATS, AUTHOR OF ENDYMION || LONDON: PRINTED FOR TAYLOR AND HESSEY, 1820’. Stung by the savage reviews and commercial failure of his previous efforts, Poems (1817) published on 10 March, 1817, and Endymion: A Poetic Romance published in early May, 1818, Keats was understandably disheartened when contemplating further publications. However, by September 1819 he was, according to Woodhouse, writing to the publisher John Taylor, willing ‘to publish the Eve of St Agnes & Lamia immediately: but Hessey told him it could not answer to do so now’. On 10 October he had spoken of writing ‘Two or three’ poems in which he wishes ‘to diffuse the colouring of St Agnes eve throughout a Poem in which Character and Sentiment would be the figures to such drapery’. He hopes that writing such poems ‘in the course of the next six 3 years, would be a famous gradus ad Parnassum altissimum—...’. Writing on 17 November, 1819, he asserted ‘I have come to a determination not to publish Anything I have now ready written’, a corpus which in fact included all the poems which were to be included in 1820. The definite decision to put together the ‘Lamia’ collection was made between the date of the letter to Taylor (17 November, 1819) and a relatively buoyant letter to his sister Fanny written on 20 December, 1819. The collection was published in late June, 1820. The result was one of the greatest poetry collections of all time, though it has rarely been considered in this integrated light since editors and critics invariably consider each poem in the chronology of its composition rather than their contribution to a unity which is greater than the sum of the parts.

The impact of gender on freedom is vividly conveyed by Fanny Hensel’s letter to her cousin Marianne from the Saint Gotthard Pass in 1822, on a family trip: I spent a day . . . I’ll keep forever in my heart, and will remember with emotion for a long time to come. . . . [I] was observing, on the Italian border, the finest, most gracious, and pleasant scene that man can imagine when destiny cried out to me: so far, and no further! . . . If I had been a young lad of sixteen yesterday, my God! I would have had to fight against committing some great folly.” As Felix’s career acquired an international perspective, Fanny craved his descriptions of foreign parts. The motif of travel was threaded through her life—whether as reality, dream, or vicarious experience. Also threaded through her life was her production of songs belonging to the categories of “songs of travel,” portraying journeying, wandering, and remote locations, whether reached or imagined. Immersed in such texts, Hensel was free to “travel” in her mind’s eye. This chapter offers close analytical and critical readings of the words and music of songs such as Hensel’s “Schwanenlied,” Op. 1, No. 1, “Gondellied,” Op. 1, No. 6, and “Bergeslust,” Op. 10, No. 5, in an effort to illuminate how the Lied (as a small, apparently enclosed genre) allowed Hensel to widen the horizons beyond her enclosed life.

The subject of this chapter, Fanny Hensel’s Lied in D♭ major for piano solo, Op. 8, No. 3, might seem an anomalous choice for a volume devoted to the composer’s texted Lieder. But one could readily advance the argument that, like Schubert, Hensel was at her core a naturally gifted song composer who gave as free a rein to lyrical impulses in her purely instrumental music as she did in setting the verses of her favorite poets—Goethe, Tieck, Eichendorff, and Heine. Some of her piano pieces, which she typically titled Lieder or Klavierlieder, raise the question as to whether particular poetic sources lay behind their inspiration. Perhaps the most enigmatic of these examples is Op. 8, No. 3, which, when published posthumously in 1850, appeared with the title Lied, to which was added in parentheses “Lenau.” This chapter takes into account the sixteen Lenau settings composed by Hensel and her brother between 1839 and 1847, and considers whether Op. 8, No. 3 might be linked to specific verses of Lenau, or might offer, perhaps, a musical portrait of the poet, who suffered a mental collapse in 1844.

Abstract As a genre, pornography is uniquely in a position to imagine sexual possibilities and gendered selves without reference to actually existing practices and bodies, and as such it has none of the limitations of law or medicine. As a consequence, late-Victorian erotica is a place to look for two configurations that appealed to and eluded the figures in previous chapters: fully mutual and reciprocated same-sex relationships and bodies that seem to transition themselves under the pressure of cross-gender identification to the extent that the anatomical components of the body are made to match outside signs of a gender expression. This chapter explores these possibilities in readings of the multiple authored Teleny (1893) in which Wilde is sometimes thought to have participated and Le Roman De Violette (1891), a French text now ascribed to Henriette de Mannoury d’Ectot. These sections bracket readings of two other texts, Sins of the Cities of the Plain (1881) and Letters from Laura and Eveline (1883) in which Fanny and Stella appear as characters. In the process of imagining them as transsexual figures, these novels amplify dissonant notes that could not be incorporated into the narratives offered at their trial, in the process allowing for more complicated intersections between gender and sexual identity.