Julie D. Prandi

John Michael Cooper

This is a compendium of scholarship concerning the lives, works, and receptions of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy and Fanny Hensel. Representing the latest work of leading specialists from the USA, France, Great Britain, and Italy, the essays are organized according to a number of issues thathave become vital during the past 20 years: sources and source problems--including the disposition of missing and lost works, issues of musical identity as they pertain to little-known concert arias, and editorial issues presented by the organ preludes op. 37; studies of individual works--includingFelix Mendelssohn's first composition, the 'Scottish' and 'Reformation' symphonies, and Die erste Walpurgisnacht); problematic repertoires--Felix's occasional works, song cycles, and opera plans; the relationships between Felix and Fanny; and issues of reception history--including Felix's influencesas composer of organ music and string quartets, and gender and race in biographical studies of Felix.

Their Music in History

The Mendelssohns

The Poetry of the Self-Taught demonstrates the characteristic strengths of self-taught poetry and analyzes the factors that have caused most selftaught poets to disappear from anthologies and from literary history. Raising the question of whether or not their work should be read today and taken seriously - instead of being relegated to separate and unequal categories like women's or «peasant» poetry - the book highlights interesting contrasts between the poetry of eighteenth-century autodidacts such as Robert Burns, Mary Leapor, C.D.F. Schubart, and Anna Louise Karsch and the work of their contemporaries, mainstream poets like Alexander Pope, James Thomson, C.F. Gellert, and Barthold Heinrich Brockes. Self-taught poetry is often treated as an index to the lives and times of the poets, but this book explores it with a different purpose: to understand and illustrate the commonalities in autodidactic poetics, imagery, rhetorical strategies, and themes. Concurrent with a recent upturn of interest in «laboring» or self-taught poets both in England and in Germany, The Poetry of the Self-Taught will be useful for courses focusing on such poets or those dealing with eighteenth-century literature.

An Eighteenth-century Phenomenon

The Poetry of the Self-taught

The paradigms of conflict for spirited women in drama often differ from those of comparable male heroes. As a character active in determining her own fate, the spirited woman must choose between self-realization in the private sphere, the traditional stronghold or prison of women, and the public sphere, an area of particular peril for women. In either case the hero's identity is established largely by resistence to or direct defiance of the behavioral norms for her sex.

Major Female Characters in the Dramas of Goethe, Schiller, and Kleist

Spirited Women Heroes

This book explores Goethe's ethics of happiness and the role of resignation within them. Prandi has carefully separated autobiographical material from literary expository of these themes in order to clarify the misunderstanding that has resulted from relying on Goethe's fictional works to document his personal ethical convictions. The book aims in part at working out in detail the usefulness of Spinoza's Ethics in evaluating ethical views expressed in poetry and fiction; and in part at correcting erroneous and confused ideas about Goethean resignation. Prandi studies the 'natural morality' Goethe developed and practiced, using Lucretius and Spinoza as models of influence. All three define the good as what makes people rationally happy; each has his own resignation model to offer. From a deep analysis of views on happiness and resignation, the author's discussion leads to some surprising new conclusions.

Julie D. Prandi

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