Journal articles on the topic 'Twentieth-century spanish poetry'

AbstractThis essay offers a philological career of the term world poetry as poets and scholars employed it and close cognates across the twentieth century (the century in which it first appeared). This career emphasizes trajectories in three of the West’s imperial language formations—poésie mondiale in French, poesía mundial in Spanish, and world poetry in English—but also highlights kindred trajectories in non-Western languages, such as sheʿr-e jahān in Persian and shiʿr fi al-ʿalam in Arabic. Corroborating Édouard Glissant’s claim that “the amassing of commonplaces is, perhaps, the right approach to my real subject—the entanglements of worldwide relation,” the essay argues for an understanding of world poetry as the accumulated philological history of poetic folkways, habits of use, sociological institutions, formations, and conjunctures that group around the term itself.

In this paper, I analyze Russian translations and close imitations of Spanish Romancero poetry composed between 1789 and the 1930s, as well as Russian original poems of the same period marked by “Spanish” motifs. I discuss the Spanish romance as an international European genre, and show how this verse form’s distinctive features were transferred into Russian poetry and how the Russian version – or, rather, several Russian versions – of this form came into being. I pay special attention to the genesis of the stanza composed of a regular sequence of feminine (F) and masculine (m) clausulae FFFm. In Johann Gottfried Herder’s Der Cid, this clausula pattern was combined with unrhymed trochaic tetrameters, but, in early twentieth-century Russia, it emancipated from this metrical form, having retained the semantic leitmotifs of the Spanish romance, as well as its “Spanish” theme. I contextualize other translation equivalents of romance verse and compare them to the original Spanish verse form. I show (1) which forms poets used in translating romance verse and how those forms correlate (formally and functionally) with the original meter. Further, I discuss (2) when and how the trochaic tetrameters rhyming on even lines (XRXR) – originally used in translations of Spanish romances in German and English poetry – became the equivalent of romance verse in the Russian tradition. Finally, I demonstrate (3) how, in Konstantin Balmont’s translations of Spanish poetry, the FFFm clausula pattern lost its connection with trochee. After Balmont, other poets of the Silver Age of Russian literature started using it in original non-trochaic compositions to express “Spanish” semantics.

Se describe analíticamente un recorrido histórico de los vínculos literarios, culturales y editoriales entre la producción poética costarricense del siglo xx, y la tradición lírica castellana. Sitúa las letras costarricenses en su contexto hispanoamericano, y señala algunos hitos que podrían explicar etapas y aspectos significativos de su desarrollo literario. An analytical description is provided of the literary, cultural and publishing ties existing between Costa Rican twentieth-century poetry and the Spanish lyric tradition. It situates Costa Rican letters in their Latin American context and suggests certain milestones which could explain significant stages and aspects of its literary development.

During the Baroque period, Luis De GÓngora y Argote (1561–1627) wrote the first Spanish-language closeted literature. Some three hundred years later, the challenging originality of his closet verse, openly studied and appreciated by a cultured, intellectual elite, played a pivotal role in the development of homosexual literature in the early-twentieth-century avant-garde movements of Spain and Latin America. This essay will briefly explore how twentieth-century Mexican avant-garde writers expressed the closet using baroque models. The thesis is that the rhetorical strategies of obscuritas provided Góngora an ideal instrument for representing the closet, which in literature is defined as a symbolic space that allows writers to represent and readers to recognize homosexuality in a heterosexual context. The pertinent OED definition of closet as an adjective reads, “secret, covert, used esp. with reference to homosexuality” (“Closet”). This recognized use of obscuritas is validated further in the observations of the Peruvian colonial writer Espinosa Medrano, one of Góngora's seventeenth-century commentators, who epitomizes the consolidation of baroque aesthetics in Hispanic America by the criollo elite. The final chapter in this tour of the baroque closet will examine how the Mexican avant-garde became aware of obscuritas through Federico García Lorca's Gongorine lectures and poetry.

En la poesía española de finales del siglo XX no es frecuente que expresividad y moldes métricos aparezcan como términos opuestos. De forma generalizada, los autores de este período utilizan versos y estrofas clásicas. Además, no es frecuente encontrar entre ellos escritos de indagación teórica sobre cuestiones métricas. Sin embargo, cuando éstos aparecen, la variación sobre los modelos clásicos suele ir unida a la búsqueda de un determinado efecto expresivo. Algunos poetas, como Antonio Carvajal, consideran que estas variaciones deben constituir un objeto preferente de la métrica. Para otros, como Miguel d’Ors, estos desvíos pertenecen más bien al ámbito de la artesanía.In Spanish poetry at the end of the Twentieth Century, expressiveness and metrical forms are not often seen as opposite terms. In general, the authors of this period use classic models of verses and stanzas. Furthermore, theoretical research on metrics is not usually found among them. Nevertheless, when they have appeared, variations on classic models are accompanied by a search for a particular expressive effect. Some poets such as Antonio Carvajal think these variations must be a priority object in metrics. Meanwhile, for other authors like Miguel d’Ors, these innovations belong to the craftmanship scope.

This paper tries to elucidate the significance of Latin schooling for the production of poetry by lining up five typical cases of recycling Roman texts, from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. The French poet Baudri de Bourgueil (ca 1050–1130) rewrote Ovid’s Heroides 16–17 within a cultural context, characteristic of the incipient “Ovidian age,” aetas ovidiana, based on classroom practices such as paraphrase, accessus and glosses, presupposing a sense of historical continuity – or translatio studii et imperii – from Antiquity down to the twelfth century. In his great work, The Comedy, the Florentine Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) reused Ovid in a quite different way, representative of the allegorizing tendencies noticeable in Italy and France towards the end of the Ovidian age. The Early Modern motto ad fontes, on the other hand, presupposed a breach between ancient and present times, none the less possible (and surely commendable) to bridge by means of imitation within the framework of studia humanitatis and a new philological culture, made possible by the printing press. This cultural paradigm shift is illustrated by a look at a famous sonnet by the Spanish Golden Age poet Francisco de Quevedo (1580–1645). Finally, our modern and postmodern era, characterized by an ambivalent attitude to the classical heritage, is represented by the Anglo-American poet T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) and his Swedish successor Hjalmar Gullberg (1898–1961), both of whom remembered their Latin classes in their mature poetry, marked by irony, distance and, probably, nostalgia.

Three odes to Barcelona, written by Jacint Verdaguer, Joan Maragall, and “Pere Quart” [Joan Oliver] respectively, make clear the changing faces of the city. For Verdaguer, Barcelona is an expansive metropolis on its way to greatness. For Maragall, Barcelona, while rocked by conflict, remains the inescapable center and “great enchantress” of Catalan life. For Pere Quart, Barcelona is the locus of a sweeping revolution aimed at bringing about a new social order —a hope promptly shattered by the Spanish war of 1936-39. The three odes roughly correspond to three generations and offer a poetic history of the city. Skipping a generation and shifting from poetry to film, the article addresses Barcelona at the turn of the twentieth century as seen by Pedro Almodóvar in his 1998 Oscar-winning film, Todo sobre mi madre. In Almodóvar’s portrait, Barcelona is detached from its role as Catalan capital and becomes a globalized city for postmodern pilgrimages. As if to underscore this move, the celebrated technique known as trencadís employed by Gaudí and other modernists (and consisting of broken pieces of ceramic put together to form new ornamental compositions) serves as a symbolic backdrop to a number of characters who flock to the city to give new meaning to their fragmented selves.

La poesía de Ana Istarú se erige a principios del siglo XXI como un imaginario rico y de obligada visita, pues refleja el resultado del proceso histórico de la forja de la identidad del pueblo costarricense tras la independencia de la metrópoli en el marco de su historia literaria, de la centroamericana y en el de habla hispana con toda la problemática que ello implica en territorio tico. Los poemas de La estación de fiebre manifiestan el deseo de independencia e integración de la mujer en el ámbito de lo público a través del cuerpo y de la palabra en el último tercio del siglo XX. Para ello la escritora no duda en denunciar igualmente en su discurso las consecuencias negativas que ha tenido el patriarcado. Ana Istarú’s poetry began to develop in the early twenty-first century as a rich imaginary not to be missed. It reflects the result of a historical process to forge the identity of Costa Ricans after their independence in the framework of literary history and in particular of Central America and the Spanish-speaking community with all the complexity that this involves in Costa Rica. The poems in La estación de fiebre show a desire for independence and the integration of the woman in the public sphere through her body and through her words in the last third of the twentieth century. Likewise, in her writing Istarú does not hesitate to denounce the negative effects of patriarchy.

The term ‘protest song’, which became so familiar in the context of the anti-war movement in the United States during the 1960s, has been widely applied to the songs of socio-political commitment which have developed out of traditional folksong in most of the countries of Latin America over the past twenty years (see Pring-Mill 1983 and forthcoming). Yet it is misleading insofar as it might seem to imply that all such songs are ‘anti’ something: denouncing some negative abuse rather than promoting something positive to put in its place. A more helpful designation is that of ‘songs of hope and struggle’, enshrined in the titles of two Spanish American anthologies (C. W. 1967 and Gac Artigas 1973), which nicely stresses both their ‘combative’ and their ‘constructive’ aspects, while one of the best of their singers – the Uruguayan Daniel Viglietti – describes his own songs as being ‘in some measure both de protesta and de propuesta’ (i.e. as much ‘proposing’ as they are ‘protesting’). The document with which this article is chiefly concerned uses the term ‘revolutionary song’, which clearly covers both those aspects, but such songs may be seen to perform a far more complex range of tasks than any of those labels might suggest, as soon as their functions are examined ‘on the ground’ within the immediate context of the predominantly oral cultures of Latin America to which they are addressed: cultures in which traditional folksong has retained its power and currency largely undiminished by the changes of the twentieth century, and in which the oral nature of song (with the message of its lyrics reinforced by music) helps it to gain a wider popular diffusion than the more ‘literary’ but unsung texts which make up the greater part of the genre of so-called ‘committed poetry’ (‘poesía de compromiso’) to which the lyrics of such songs clearly belong (see Pring-Mill 1978, 1979).

J. Lennart Berggren and Alexander Jones, Ptolemy's Geography: An Annotated Translation of the Theoretical Chapters. By Karin Tybjerg 194Natalia Lozovsky, ‘The Earth is Our Book’: Geographical Knowledge in the Latin West ca. 400–1000. By Evelyn Edson 196David Cantor (ed.), Reinventing Hippocrates. By Daniel Brownstein 197Peter Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500–1700. By John Henry 199Paolo Rossi, Logic and the Art of Memory: The Quest for a Universal Language. By John Henry 200Marie Boas Hall, Henry Oldenburg: Shaping the Royal Society. By Christoph Lüthy 201Richard L. Hills, James Watt, Volume 1: His Time in Scotland, 1736–1774. By David Philip Miller 203René Sigrist (ed.), H.-B. de Saussure (1740–1799): Un Regard sur la terre, Albert V. Carozzi and John K. Newman (eds.), Lectures on Physical Geography given in 1775 by Horace-Bénédict de Saussure at the Academy of Geneva/Cours de géographie physique donné en 1775 par Horace-Bénédict de Saussure à l'Académie de Genève and Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, Voyages dans les Alpes: Augmentés des Voyages en Valais, au Mont Cervin et autour du Mont Rose. By Martin Rudwick 206Anke te Heesen, The World in a Box: The Story of an Eighteenth-Century Picture Encyclopedia. By Richard Yeo 208David Boyd Haycock, William Stukeley: Science, Religion and Archaeology in Eighteenth-Century England. By Geoffrey Cantor 209Jessica Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment. By Dorinda Outram 210Michel Chaouli, The Laboratory of Poetry: Chemistry and Poetics in the Work of Friedrich Schlegel. By David Knight 211George Levine, Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England. By Michael H. Whitworth 212Agustí Nieto-Galan, Colouring Textiles: A History of Natural Dyestuffs in Industrial Europe. By Ursula Klein 214Stuart McCook, States of Nature: Science, Agriculture, and Environment in the Spanish Caribbean, 1760–1940. By Piers J. Hale 215Paola Govoni, Un pubblico per la scienza: La divulgazione scientifica nell'Italia in formazione. By Pietro Corsi 216R. W. Home, A. M. Lucas, Sara Maroske, D. M. Sinkora and J. H. Voigt (eds.), Regardfully Yours: Selected Correspondence of Ferdinand von Mueller. Volume II: 1860–1875. By Jim Endersby 217Douglas R. Weiner, Models of Nature: Ecology, Conservation and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia. With a New Afterword. By Piers J. Hale 219Helge Kragh, Quantum Generations: A History of Physics in the Twentieth Century. By Steven French 220Antony Kamm and Malcolm Baird, John Logie Baird: A Life. By Sean Johnston 221Robin L. Chazdon and T. C. Whitmore (eds.), Foundations of Tropical Forest Biology: Classic Papers with Commentaries. By Joel B. Hagen 223Stephen Jay Gould, I Have Landed: Splashes and Reflections in Natural History. By Peter J. Bowler 223Henry Harris, Things Come to Life: Spontaneous Generation Revisited. By Rainer Brömer 224Hélène Gispert (ed.), ‘Par la Science, pour la patrie’: L'Association française pour l'avancement des sciences (1872–1914), un projet politique pour une société savante. By Cristina Chimisso 225Henry Le Chatelier, Science et industrie: Les Débuts du taylorisme en France. By Robert Fox 227Margit Szöllösi-Janze (ed.), Science in the Third Reich. By Jonathan Harwood 227Vadim J. Birstein, The Perversion of Knowledge; The true Story of Soviet Science. By C. A. J. Chilvers 229Guy Hartcup, The Effect of Science on the Second World War. By David Edgerton 230Lillian Hoddeson and Vicki Daitch, True Genius: The Life and Science of John Bardeen, the Only Winner of Two Nobel Prizes in Physics. By Arne Hessenbruch 230Stephen B. Johnson, The Secret of Apollo: Systems Management in American and European Space Programs, John M. Logsdon (ed.), Exploring the Unknown: Selected Documents in the History of the U.S. Civil Space Program. Volume V: Exploring the Cosmos and Douglas J. Mudgway, Uplink-Downlink: A History of the Deep Space Network 1957–1997. By Jon Agar 231Helen Ross and Cornelis Plug, The Mystery of the Moon Illusion: Exploring Size Perception. By Klaus Hentschel 233Matthew R. Edwards (ed.), Pushing Gravity: New Perspectives on Le Sage's Theory of Gravitation. By Friedrich Steinle 234Ernest B. Hook (ed.), Prematurity in Scientific Discovery: On Resistance and Neglect. By Alex Dolby 235John Waller, Fabulous Science: Fact and Fiction in the History of Scientific Discovery. By Alex Dolby 236Rosalind Williams, Retooling: A Historian Confronts Technological Change. By Keith Vernon 237Colin Divall and Andrew Scott, Making Histories in Transport Museums. By Anthony Coulls 238

Reading the text of the main representative of Spanish mysticism, which is Saint Teresa of Jesus, we can see similarities with the philosophical refl ections of the modern thinker Giorgio Agamben. In both of them we fi nd an analogous approach to the issues that concern them the most: for the mystic it is God, for Agamben, language. Poetic images used by Saint Teresa of Jesus, are transforming into the philosophical concepts used by Agamben. The thinking of both is similar, although the message is completely diff erent. Filled with the “faith, hope and love” of Saint Teresa of Jesus wants to draw a path, a leading soul to God, a synonym for life, and Agamben, infl uenced by the thoughts of Hegel and Heidegger, outlines a situation in which a lost human being is in a cul-de-sac ending with terrifying death wall. Hence the mysticism of the sixteenth century can be called the mysticism of life, while philosophical considerations over the language of the twentieth century, the mysticism of death.

In his masterpiece Don Quijote of La Mancha, Miguel de Cervantes uses protagonists Don Quijote and his squire, Sancho Panza, to discuss various important themes, including the juxtaposition of reality and illusion, and the Spanish culture itself—both of which continue to be relevant today. He attributes ideas such as illusion and idealism to Don Quijote, and reality and realism to Sancho Panza. All of these attributes can be applied to Spain, a country with a history full of contrasts. This is especially clear through the history of Spain in the twentieth century. At this time Spain lost its last colonies, had a civil war which resulted in a 36 year dictatorship, and, obtained freedom with the death of Franco in 1975. This study examines poems by writers such as Miguel de Unamuno, Miguel Hernández, and Mario Hernández and analyses the attitudes present towards each of these historic events. In doing so, it becomes clear that the Spanish mindset shifts between moments of“quijotismo” and moments of “sanchismo.” Therefore, this study aims to demonstrate that by analyzing twentieth century Spanish poetry, it is clear that Cervantes’ masterpiece Don Quijote serves as the symbol of the Spanish spirit throughout history.

Este artículo pretende mostrar la presencia de la poesía de Edgar Allan Poe en Antonio Machado, quien afi rmó en “Poética” (1931) que el poeta norteamericano era uno de los padres de la poesía moderna, así como el autor del mejor poema compuesto en el siglo XIX, “The Raven”. En primer lugar, abordaremos el estudio de la circulación y recepción de la poesía de Poe en España durante las primeras décadas del siglo XX, lo que nos permitirá elaborar un mapa de las diferentes rutas que le llevaron hasta Machado. Finalmente, el análisis de algunos poemas de Machado pertenecientes a Soledades y Campos de Castilla, especialmente aquellos dedicados a su joven esposa muerta, revelarán imágenes de melancolía, amor, muerte y sueños que recuerdan a Poe.Yesterday is Nevermore!: Reception and Infl uence of Edgar Allan Poe’s Poetry on Antonio Machado Abstract: This paper aims at offering a picture of Edgar Allan Poe’s legacy to the Spanish poet Antonio Machado, who defended in “Poética” (1931) that the American poet was one of the fathers of modern poetry as well as the author of the best poem written in the nineteenth century, “The Raven”. An initial overview of the circulation and reception of Poe’s poetry in Spain during the fi rst decades of the twentieth century will help trace the different routes that took him to Antonio Machado. Finally, the analysis of some of Machado’s poems in Soledades y Campos de Castilla, especially those devoted to her young departed wife, will disclose images of melancholy, love, death and dreams thar are reminiscent of Poe.

El presente trabajo aborda la relación tópica, establecida por la crítica de una manera unánime, entre la «formación» o «constitución» del canon literario (en este caso, el «canon poético») y las antologías. Con este propósito se estudian aquí en algunas cuestiones relativas a las antologías panorámicas de la poesía española editadas en el siglo XX, con especial atención al modelo que la crítica anglosajona denomina teaching anthologies y la inapreciable influencia de dicho modelo en el modo antológico del hispanismo peninsular.This work studies the topical relationship, fitted by criticism just in a way, between «formation» and «constitution» of literary canon (in this case, «poetical canon») and anthologies. With this purpouse, it studies some questions about panoramic anthologies of spanish poetry edited in Twentieth Century, paying special attention to the pattern that Anglo-saxon criticism name «teaching anthologies» and the short influence of this pattern in the anthological way of peninsular hispanic criticism.

Resumen: Este trabajo ofrece un análisis de dos traducciones al español de sendos poemas del autor británico William Wordsworth publicadas en la segunda década del siglo XX, con el propósito de estudiar las repercusiones que el grado de reescritura ejercido por los traductores tuvo en la imagen del poeta y su obra que se transmitió a los lectores españoles de los años 20. Dada la naturaleza de este trabajo, el planteamiento metodológico que aquí se propone es multidisciplinar, enmarcado principalmente dentro de la Literatura Comparada, junto con herramientas y postulados estrechamente ligados a ésta, como los derivados de los Estudios de Recepción y los Estudios de Traducción. Title in English: “A Study on the Reception of the Translated Poetry of William Wordsworth in 1920s Spain: ‘Tintern Abbey’ and ‘Personal Talk’”Abstract: This article considers two Spanish translations of two poems by William Wordsworth, published in the second decade of the twentieth century. The central aim behind this examination is that of studying the impact that the degree of rewriting exercised by the translators had on the shaping of the image of the poet and his work that was conveyed to his Spanish readers during the 1920s. To this end, we propose an interdisciplinary approach chiefly grounded on Comparative Literature, along with some postulates and methodological tools closely linked to that discipline, including the ones derived from Reception Studies and Translation Studies.

This article concentrates on Rabindranath’s reception in a few Latin American countries. In the history of Latin America, early twentieth century was a crucial time when various Latin American countries were striving to come out of Europe’s grasp and establish an identity of their own. Yet, in the multifarious and multiracial society of Latin America it was difficult to define their ‘own’. At such a critical juncture of history, Rabindranath represented an alternative to various Latin American authors. He was, to them, a representative of a British colony who had been recognised and acknowledged by Europe, and thus symbolized a power/knowledge equivalent to that of Europe. This paper, divided in three parts, explores this reception and its impact, firstly by analyzing the history of the direct contact; then by focusing on the Latin American translations of Rabindranath’s works; and finally, by re-reading a few essays and critical-writings on Rabindranath. Among others, the paper alludes to Victoria Ocampo (1890-1979), the first and perhaps the only Latin American author who came in direct contact with Rabindranath; and some of the most important Nobel Laureates of Latin America, like Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957) and Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), to show how these authors and poets received Rabindranath in their own contexts. Este artículo se concentra en la recepción de Rabindranath Tagore en algunos países de América Latina. En la historia de este continente, los primeros años del siglo XX fueron cruciales, porque muchos países de América Latina estaban esforzándose por destruir el control de Europa y establecer una identidad propia. Sin embargo, era difícil definir “lo propio” en una sociedad tan múltiple y multirracial. En un momento tan complejo de la historia, Tagore personificaba una alternativa para algunos autores de América Latina. Él era como un representante del “tercer mundo” que había ganado el reconocimiento de Europa, de los colonizadores; por tal motivo, su poder/sabiduría era tan fuerte como el de los británicos. Este artículo, dividido en tres partes, busca primero explorar la historia del contacto directo entre el poeta hindú y algunos escritores latinoamericanos; segundo, analizar varias traducciones de las obras de Tagore, hechas por latinoamericanos; y, finalmente, discutir unos ensayos y textos críticos realizados por estudiosos de América Latina sobre Tagore. El artículo se centra en Victoria Ocampo (1890-1979), la única autora del mundo hispano con quien Tagore tenía un contacto directo, y también en poetas de nombre mundial como Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957) y Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), para explicar cómo ellos recibieron a Tagore.

Professor Antonio Miranda Regojo-Borges is a polymath; an architectural critic whose knowledge base covers centuries, reaches across disciplines and informs his polemic thoughts. He writes quixotic and “antiquarian” prose - in the style of Wollflin’s principles of art history, Kant’s theories on taste, and William Gilpin’s Eighteenth Century tour journals. In its enumerative tendencies, it is reminiscent of the analytical theorists Edmund Burke, whilst in its examination of architecture in the cultural industry context it reminds us of Theodore Adorno. At times ironic, at times bombastic, and at times mocking, his writing style will alienate as many as it enthuses. He will not care. This text offers both a critique of modern culture and an outline model for architectural criticism. Rooted in the most radical beliefs of a Twentieth Century Modernism, that for many seems moribund today, it argues that the pillars upon which the modern utopian vision was constructed remain essential – perhaps more essential than ever today. In the media obsessed, consumerist context of the present, and in the aftermath of the latest economic collapse to befall the world economy, it argues for an architecture of “the essential” – a functional and poetic architecture of the anti-spectacle. Antonio Miranda is the author of 15 books amongst which we can list, to name but a few: Antología de arquitectura moderna 1900-1990; Ni robot ni bufón: manual para la crítica de arquitectura; Horizonte cerrado; Columnas para la resistencia - variaciones sobre ciudad, arquitectura y subcultura; and .A todos los becarios de la reina - ocho ensayos de estética civil. He has spent a career of over 40 years writing some of the most ardent and focused architectural criticism in the Spanish language. Based on the idea of “falsation”, as developed by Karl Popper, it comes close to being a manifesto for criticism. It offers guidelines for rooting out “bad” architecture – a series of pointers to be used in judging the work of an architect. These pointers, he suggests, will not produce “great” buildings, but may be useful in the “identification” of architecture that does not conform to “minimum standards of function and rationalism”. For some it will be rigid, prescriptive, dogmatic and impractical. It is certainly satirical, ruthless and uncompromising. On the “Falsation” of Deceitful Architectures, as the title suggests, is no ordinary architectural text.

Introduction One of the ways in which ‘country’ is made to work discursively is in ‘country music’ – defining a genre and sensibility in music production, marketing and consumption. This article seeks to excavate one small niche in the historical geography of country music to explore exactly how discursive antecedents emerged, and crucially, how images associated with ‘country’ surfaced and travelled internationally via one of the new ‘global’ media of the first half of the twentieth century – sheet music. My central arguments are twofold: first, that alongside aural qualities and lyrical content, the visual elements of sheet music were important and thus far have been under-acknowledged. Sheet music diffused the imagery connecting ‘country’ to music, to particular landscapes, and masculinities. In the literature on country music much emphasis has been placed on film, radio and television (Tichi; Peterson). Yet, sheet music was for several decades the most common way people bought personal copies of songs they liked and intended to play at home on piano, guitar or ukulele. This was particularly the case in Australia – geographically distant, and rarely included in international tours by American country music stars. Sheet music is thus a rich text to reveal the historical contours of ‘country’. My second and related argument is that that the possibilities for the globalising of ‘country’ were first explored in music. The idea of transnational discourses associated with ‘country’ and ‘rurality’ is relatively new (Cloke et al; Gorman-Murray et al; McCarthy), but in music we see early evidence of a globalising discourse of ‘country’ well ahead of the time period usually analysed. Accordingly, my focus is on the sheet music of country songs in Australia in the first half of the twentieth century and on how visual representations hybridised travelling themes to create a new vernacular ‘country’ in Australia. Creating ‘Country’ Music Country music, as its name suggests, is perceived as the music of rural areas, “defined in contrast to metropolitan norms” (Smith 301). However, the ‘naturalness’ of associations between country music and rurality belies a history of urban capitalism and the refinement of deliberate methods of marketing music through associated visual imagery. Early groups wore suits and dressed for urban audiences – but then altered appearances later, on the insistence of urban record companies, to emphasise rurality and cowboy heritage. Post-1950, ‘country’ came to replace ‘folk’ music as a marketing label, as the latter was considered to have too many communistic references (Hemphill 5), and the ethnic mixing of earlier folk styles was conveniently forgotten in the marketing of ‘country’ music as distinct from African American ‘race’ and ‘r and b’ music. Now an industry of its own with multinational headquarters in Nashville, country music is a ‘cash cow’ for entertainment corporations, with lower average production costs, considerable profit margins, and marketing advantages that stem from tropes of working class identity and ‘rural’ honesty (see Lewis; Arango). Another of country music’s associations is with American geography – and an imagined heartland in the colonial frontier of the American West. Slippages between ‘country’ and ‘western’ in music, film and dress enhance this. But historical fictions are masked: ‘purists’ argue that western dress and music have nothing to do with ‘country’ (see truewesternmusic.com), while recognition of the Spanish-Mexican, Native American and Hawaiian origins of ‘cowboy’ mythology is meagre (George-Warren and Freedman). Similarly, the highly international diffusion and adaptation of country music as it rose to prominence in the 1940s is frequently downplayed (Connell and Gibson), as are the destructive elements of colonialism and dispossession of indigenous peoples in frontier America (though Johnny Cash’s 1964 album The Ballads Of The American Indian: Bitter Tears was an exception). Adding to the above is the way ‘country’ operates discursively in music as a means to construct particular masculinities. Again, linked to rural imagery and the American frontier, the dominant masculinity is of rugged men wrestling nature, negotiating hardships and the pressures of family life. Country music valorises ‘heroic masculinities’ (Holt and Thompson), with echoes of earlier cowboy identities reverberating into contemporary performance through dress style, lyrical content and marketing imagery. The men of country music mythology live an isolated existence, working hard to earn an income for dependent families. Their music speaks to the triumph of hard work, honest values (meaning in this context a musical style, and lyrical concerns that are ‘down to earth’, ‘straightforward’ and ‘without pretence’) and physical strength, in spite of neglect from national governments and uncaring urban leaders. Country music has often come to be associated with conservative politics, heteronormativity, and whiteness (Gibson and Davidson), echoing the wider politics of ‘country’ – it is no coincidence, for example, that the slogan for the 2008 Republican National Convention in America was ‘country first’. And yet, throughout its history, country music has also enabled more diverse gender performances to emerge – from those emphasising (or bemoaning) domesticity; assertive femininity; creative negotiation of ‘country’ norms by gay men; and ‘alternative’ culture (captured in the marketing tag, ‘alt.country’); to those acknowledging white male victimhood, criminality (‘the outlaw’), vulnerability and cruelty (see Johnson; McCusker and Pecknold; Saucier). Despite dominant tropes of ‘honesty’, country music is far from transparent, standing for certain values and identities, and yet enabling the construction of diverse and contradictory others. Historical analysis is therefore required to trace the emergence of ‘country’ in music, as it travelled beyond America. A Note on Sheet Music as Media Source Sheet music was one of the main modes of distribution of music from the 1930s through to the 1950s – a formative period in which an eclectic group of otherwise distinct ‘hillbilly’ and ‘folk’ styles moved into a single genre identity, and after which vinyl singles and LP records with picture covers dominated. Sheet music was prevalent in everyday life: beyond radio, a hit song was one that was widely purchased as sheet music, while pianos and sheet music collections (stored in a piece of furniture called a ‘music canterbury’) in family homes were commonplace. Sheet music is in many respects preferable to recorded music as a form of evidence for historical analysis of country music. Picture LP covers did not arrive until the late 1950s (by which time rock and roll had surpassed country music). Until then, 78 rpm shellac discs, the main form of pre-recorded music, featured generic brown paper sleeves from the individual record companies, or city retail stores. Also, while radio was clearly central to the consumption of music in this period, it obviously also lacked the pictorial element that sheet music could provide. Sheet music bridged the music and printing industries – the latter already well-equipped with colour printing, graphic design and marketing tools. Sheet music was often literally crammed with information, providing the researcher with musical notation, lyrics, cover art and embedded advertisements – aural and visual texts combined. These multiple dimensions of sheet music proved useful here, for clues to the context of the music/media industries and geography of distribution (for instance, in addresses for publishers and sheet music retail shops). Moreover, most sheet music of the time used rich, sometimes exaggerated, images to convince passing shoppers to buy songs that they had possibly never heard. As sheet music required caricature rather than detail or historical accuracy, it enabled fantasy without distraction. In terms of representations of ‘country’, then, sheet music is perhaps even more evocative than film or television. Hundreds of sheet music items were collected for this research over several years, through deliberate searching (for instance, in library archives and specialist sheet music stores) and with some serendipity (for instance, when buying second hand sheet music in charity shops or garage sales). The collected material is probably not representative of all music available at the time – it is as much a specialised personal collection as a comprehensive survey. However, at least some material from all the major Australian country music performers of the time were found, and the resulting collection appears to be several times larger than that held currently by the National Library of Australia (from which some entries were sourced). All examples here are of songs written by, or cover art designed for Australian country music performers. For brevity’s sake, the following analysis of the sheet music follows a crudely chronological framework. Country Music in Australia Before ‘Country’ Country music did not ‘arrive’ in Australia from America as a fully-finished genre category; nor was Australia at the time without rural mythology or its own folk music traditions. Associations between Australian national identity, rurality and popular culture were entrenched in a period of intense creativity and renewed national pride in the decades prior to and after Federation in 1901. This period saw an outpouring of art, poetry, music and writing in new nationalist idiom, rooted in ‘the bush’ (though drawing heavily on Celtic expressions), and celebrating themes of mateship, rural adversity and ‘battlers’. By the turn of the twentieth century, such myths, invoked through memory and nostalgia, had already been popularised. Australia had a fully-established system of colonies, capital cities and state governments, and was highly urbanised. Yet the poetry, folk music and art, invariably set in rural locales, looked back to the early 1800s, romanticising bush characters and frontier events. The ‘bush ballad’ was a central and recurring motif, one that commentators have argued was distinctly, and essentially ‘Australian’ (Watson; Smith). Sheet music from this early period reflects the nationalistic, bush-orientated popular culture of the time: iconic Australian fauna and flora are prominent, and Australian folk culture is emphasised as ‘native’ (being the first era of cultural expressions from Australian-born residents). Pioneer life and achievements are celebrated. ‘Along the road to Gundagai’, for instance, was about an iconic Australian country town and depicted sheep droving along rustic trails with overhanging eucalypts. Male figures are either absent, or are depicted in situ as lone drovers in the archetypal ‘shepherd’ image, behind their flocks of sheep (Figure 1). Figure 1: No. 1 Magpie Ballads – The Pioneer (c1900) and Along the road to Gundagai (1923). Further colonial ruralities developed in Australia from the 1910s to 1940s, when agrarian values grew in the promotion of Australian agricultural exports. Australia ‘rode on the sheep’s back’ to industrialisation, and governments promoted rural development and inland migration. It was a period in which rural lifestyles were seen as superior to those in the crowded inner city, and government strategies sought to create a landed proletariat through post-war land settlement and farm allotment schemes. National security was said to rely on populating the inland with those of European descent, developing rural industries, and breeding a healthier and yet compliant population (Dufty), from which armies of war-ready men could be recruited in times of conflict. Popular culture served these national interests, and thus during these decades, when ‘hillbilly’ and other North American music forms were imported, they were transformed, adapted and reworked (as in other places such as Canada – see Lehr). There were definite parallels in the frontier narratives of the United States (Whiteoak), and several local adaptations followed: Tex Morton became Australia’s ‘Yodelling boundary rider’ and Gordon Parsons became ‘Australia’s yodelling bushman’. American songs were re-recorded and performed, and new original songs written with Australian lyrics, titles and themes. Visual imagery in sheet music built upon earlier folk/bush frontier themes to re-cast Australian pastoralism in a more settled, modernist and nationalist aesthetic; farms were places for the production of a robust nation. Where male figures were present on sheet music covers in the early twentieth century, they became more prominent in this period, and wore Akubras (Figure 2). The lyrics to John Ashe’s Growin’ the Golden Fleece (1952) exemplify this mix of Australian frontier imagery, new pastoralist/nationalist rhetoric, and the importation of American cowboy masculinity: Go west and take up sheep, man, North Queensland is the shot But if you don’t get rich, man, you’re sure to get dry rot Oh! Growin’ the golden fleece, battlin’ a-way out west Is bound to break your flamin’ heart, or else expand your chest… We westerners are handy, we can’t afford to crack Not while the whole darn’d country is riding on our back Figure 2: Eric Tutin’s Shearers’ Jamboree (1946). As in America, country music struck a chord because it emerged “at a point in history when the project of the creation and settlement of a new society was underway but had been neither completed nor abandoned” (Dyer 33). Governments pressed on with the colonial project of inland expansion in Australia, despite the theft of indigenous country this entailed, and popular culture such as music became a means to normalise and naturalise the process. Again, mutations of American western imagery, and particular iconic male figures were important, as in Roy Darling’s (1945) Overlander Trail (Figure 3): Wagon wheels are rolling on, and the days seem mighty long Clouds of heat-dust in the air, bawling cattle everywhere They’re on the overlander trail Where only sheer determination will prevail Men of Aussie with a job to do, they’ll stick and drive the cattle through And though they sweat they know they surely must Keep on the trail that winds a-head thro’ heat and dust All sons of Aussie and they will not fail. Sheet music depicted silhouetted men in cowboy hats on horses (either riding solo or in small groups), riding into sunsets or before looming mountain ranges. Music – an important part of popular culture in the 1940s – furthered the colonial project of invading, securing and transforming the Australian interior by normalising its agendas and providing it with heroic male characters, stirring tales and catchy tunes. Figure 3: ‘Roy Darling’s (1945) Overlander Trail and Smoky Dawson’s The Overlander’s Song (1946). ‘Country Music’ Becomes a (Globalised) Genre Further growth in Australian country music followed waves of popularity in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s, and was heavily influenced by new cross-media publicity opportunities. Radio shows expanded, and western TV shows such as Bonanza and On the Range fuelled a ‘golden age’. Australian performers such as Slim Dusty and Smokey Dawson rose to fame (see Fitzgerald and Hayward) in an era when rural-urban migration peaked. Sheet music reflected the further diffusion and adoption of American visual imagery: where male figures were present on sheet music covers, they became more prominent than before and wore Stetsons. Some were depicted as chiselled-faced but simple men, with plain clothing and square jaws. Others began to more enthusiastically embrace cowboy looks, with bandana neckerchiefs, rawhide waistcoats, embellished and harnessed tall shaft boots, pipe-edged western shirts with wide collars, smile pockets, snap fasteners and shotgun cuffs, and fringed leather jackets (Figure 4). Landscapes altered further too: cacti replaced eucalypts, and iconic ‘western’ imagery of dusty towns, deserts, mesas and buttes appeared (Figure 5). Any semblance of folk music’s appeal to rustic authenticity was jettisoned in favour of showmanship, as cowboy personas were constructed to maximise cinematic appeal. Figure 4: Al Dexter’s Pistol Packin’ Mama (1943) and Reg Lindsay’s (1954) Country and Western Song Album. Figure 5: Tim McNamara’s Hitching Post (1948) and Smoky Dawson’s Golden West Album (1951). Far from slavish mimicry of American culture, however, hybridisations were common. According to Australian music historian Graeme Smith (300): “Australian place names appear, seeking the same mythological resonance that American localisation evoked: hobos became bagmen […] cowboys become boundary riders.” Thus alongside reproductions of the musical notations of American songs by Lefty Frizzel, Roy Carter and Jimmie Rodgers were songs with localised themes by new Australian stars such as Reg Lindsay and Smoky Dawson: My curlyheaded buckaroo, My home way out back, and On the Murray Valley. On the cover of The square dance by the billabong (Figure 6) – the title of which itself was a conjunction of archetypal ‘country’ images from both America and Australia – a background of eucalypts and windmills frames dancers in classic 1940s western (American) garb. In the case of Tex Morton’s Beautiful Queensland (Figure 7), itself mutated from W. Lee O’Daniel’s Beautiful Texas (c1945), the sheet music instructed those playing the music that the ‘names of other states may be substituted for Queensland’. ‘Country’ music had become an established genre, with normative values, standardised images and themes and yet constituted a stylistic formula with enough polysemy to enable local adaptations and variations. Figure 6: The Square dance by the billabong, Vernon Lisle, 1951. Figure 7: Beautiful Queensland, Tex Morton, c1945 source: http://nla.gov.au/nla.mus-vn1793930. Conclusions In country music images of place and masculinity combine. In music, frontier landscapes are populated by rugged men living ‘on the range’ in neo-colonial attempts to tame the land and convert it to productive uses. This article has considered only one media – sheet music – in only one country (Australia) and in only one time period (1900-1950s). There is much more to say than was possible here about country music, place and gender – particularly recently, since ‘country’ has fragmented into several niches, and marketing of country music via cable television and the internet has ensued (see McCusker and Pecknold). My purpose here has been instead to explore the early origins of ‘country’ mythology in popular culture, through a media source rarely analysed. Images associated with ‘country’ travelled internationally via sheet music, immensely popular in the 1930s and 1940s before the advent of television. The visual elements of sheet music contributed to the popularisation and standardisation of genre expectations and appearances, and yet these too travelled and were adapted and varied in places like Australia which had their own colonial histories and folk music heritages. Evidenced here is how combinations of geographical and gender imagery embraced imported American cowboy imagery and adapted it to local markets and concerns. Australia saw itself as a modern rural utopia with export aspirations and a desire to secure permanence through taming and populating its inland. Sheet music reflected all this. So too, sheet music reveals the historical contours of ‘country’ as a transnational discourse – and the extent to which ‘country’ brought with it a clearly defined set of normative values, a somewhat exaggerated cowboy masculinity, and a remarkable capacity to be moulded to local circumstances. Well before later and more supposedly ‘global’ media such as the internet and television, the humble printed sheet of notated music was steadily shaping ‘country’ imagery, and an emergent international geography of cultural flows. References Arango, Tim. “Cashville USA.” Fortune, Jan 29, 2007. Sept 3, 2008, http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/01/22/8397980/index.htm. Cloke, Paul, Marsden, Terry and Mooney, Patrick, eds. Handbook of Rural Studies, London: Sage, 2006. 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