In The Segovia Technique (1972), Vladimir Bobri describes what a guitarist’s hand gesture must be to lean toward virtuosity. This search for the perfection of the “classical” gesture was, however, called into question by another virtuosity: that of rock music. The greatest guitarists of this genre never ceased to break the rules of this ideal gesture. In the first part of the chapter, this study briefly covers the electrification of the guitar and its consequences on guitar manufacturing and the development of the effects dedicated to guitar playing. I will then focus on the possible range of crossbreeding the classically inspired instrumental gesture before addressing Eddie Van Halen’s contribution. Finally, I will consider the influence that the rock virtuosos’ legacy, from Jimi Hendrix to Van Halen, brought to the instrumental gesture, and the tones used by composers of contemporary repertoire whose knowing use of technique has furthered the hybridization of genres.

Chapter 9 explores Goethe’s development as a dramatist, from the works of the Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) era, through the classical period to his last plays, and the associated shifts in style. It considers both the dramas that have entered the canon and those – such as the fragments, masques and Singspiele – that have now largely been forgotten. The chapter also emphasises the importance of seeing Goethe not only as a playwright but also as a practitioner, whose involvement in the Weimar court theatre helped to shape his writing.

This chapter deals with long-run equilibrium analysis. We first introduce a classical AD-AS model to analyze how the total output is determined in equilibrium under classical assumptions. Next, to analyze frictional unemployment, we discuss a model of the natural rate of unemployment. Then we introduce a representative-firm model to analyze real factor prices and income distribution. Then we introduce a classical model of real interest rate and discuss how the model may be employed to explain economic phenomena and conduct virtual experiments. Next, we introduce the quantity theory of money. We provide a case study of China’s hyperinflation in the 1940s. Finally, we introduce open-economy models to analyze the long-run equilibrium of exchange rates.

This chapter documents the differences in the five novelists’ representation of the Greek past – mythical, archaic, classical and Hellenistic. I distinguished two groups: Xenophon and Longus each offer very little myth or history before the period of the events they narrate; Chariton, Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus, on the other hand, not only use much circumstantial detail to build up a classical or (in Achilles Tatius’ case) Hellenistic world in which their story is set, but also give that world temporal depth by exploitation of mythology, and occasionally by introducing events or persons from earlier Greek history. Xenophon’s and Achilles Tatius’ worlds are such that their similarity with that of readers can almost be taken for granted, with little incentive to ask in what way and to what effect these worlds are to any degree different from their own. Chariton and Heliodorus are different: the more or less determinable historical setting combines with a decidedly contemporary σφραγίς to give readers both a strong sense of Greek cultural continuity and the opportunity to identify features where their contemporary Greek world might be significantly different: the most important such difference is Roman control of the Greek world, which is also strongly hinted at by Longus despite his choice of a timeless, predominantly rural context.

During his lifetime and afterwards, Molière was frequently and favourably compared to Plautus and Terence by early modern commentators, despite the relative paucity of direct imitation or borrowing. Only three Molière plays have clear ties to classical sources: Amphitryon, L’Avare and Les Fourberies de Scapin. Even in these cases, Molière demonstrates a constant interest in updating, adapting, or even subverting his illustrious models, while also ostentatiously rejecting the authority of classical rules. However, in this regard Molière may be imitating the traditions of classical comedy more authentically than his early modern peers recognised. Terence and Plautus were criticised in their own time for their ‘contamination’ of sources, and their free use of prior plays and comedic tropes points to a freewheeling borrowing that is close to Molière’s in spirit. In addition, the Roman playwrights’ method of performing authorship, featured most prominently in the prologues to Terence’s plays, demonstrates a similar interest in stoking controversy and rejecting pedantic rules in favor of the audience’s pleasure. Molière may well have been classical, but precisely in those ways that most irritated his classically minded contemporaries.

Derives inequalities of Rellich type in both classical and fractional form.

This chapter explores the confluence of music and memory in classical Athens by turning to figures of Sirens that frequently decorated sculpted funerary monuments. Perched above such monuments, as if on their roofs, Sirens are shown either playing musical instruments or in the throes of a lament, accompanied by birds, vessels, or other mourners. Although they occupy a different space than the figures of the deceased and their family carved below, Sirens often adopt similar postures and gestures, suggesting continuities between the body of the deceased and the body of the mourner on a kinesthetic level. Through an analysis of select examples of Siren monuments as well as a passage from Euripides’ Helen, I argue that these mythological creatures generate an imperative for the beholder to respond not simply through an imaginative act of empathy, but as a mourner fully invested in the tragedy at hand, one who remembers the dead. Sirens on funerary monuments suggest the synesthetic dimensions of sculpture, its ability to open up sensorial experiences that extend beyond sight and touch, and its powerful effects on our own capacity to remember.

Why speak of ‘reception’ in classical antiquity, rather than ‘allusion’ or ‘intertextuality’? This chapter begins by assessing the reasons for the emergence of the term reception in the scholarship of the last thirty years, identifying (a) a shift away from unilateral models of ‘influence’; (b) a postmodern promotion of the status of the ‘copy’; (c) a pedagogical need for multiplication of access points into the ancient world. But the idea of ‘reception’ has been applied primarily to post-antique cultures: why? Speaking of reception helps us break down the idea that antiquity itself was sealed off from later cultures, and that it was a homogeneous monoculture through which a single, cohesive tradition ran. It puts the emphasis on discontinuity, and the specificity and idiosyncrasy of each act of receiving; such acts can therefore be understood as ‘theorisations’ of the idea of tradition. This approach to literary history creates an equivalence between all receptions, however apparently ‘central’ or ‘marginal’. It also spotlights the political embeddedness and materiality of each act of reception. The chapter closes by considering how the volume’s contributions further this agenda.

In Western literature music functions ‘as the vehicle for everything that cannot be represented or denoted.’ Anglophone literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries works with a specific musical tradition that we broadly term ‘classical music’ which encompasses a set of intellectual, aesthetic, historical and cultural ideas. From Wagner’s Total Art-Work to Walter Pater’s claims about music as the ‘consummate’ art form, classical music as an aesthetic paradigm has not just offered literature a set of cultural reference points, but philosophical and intellectual traditions that shape its aesthetic experiments and styles. Nowhere is the idea of music more fully delineated by a composer than in the work of Wagner, and his music has had perhaps the greatest influence on literature. Wagner provides a focal point for discussions of classical music in literature in this chapter, especially around the role of the Gesamtkunstwerk in Virginia Woolf’s negotiations with aesthetics and the artwork. Laura Marcus has argued that literary modernism took on filmic devices. This chapter argues that it did the same with music. Newly conscious of forms, languages, systems and somatic effects, modernist writers turned to music and particularly Wagner as a paradigm of artistic expression.

Chapter 1 addresses the debate about the stylistics of the new (muḥdath) Abbasid poets, with a particular focus on rhetorical figures (badīʿ). It establishes that there was a shift in paradigm from an old school of criticism (ninth–eleventh century), which based its evaluation of poetry on its truthfulness and naturalness (qualities associated with the idealized “classical style” of the pre-Islamic poets), to a new school of criticism (eleventh century onwards) based on an aesthetic of wonder. This new school, represented first and foremost by ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī (d. 1078), articulated the beauty of the kinds of rhetorical figures (badīʿ) that the muḥdath poets relished, especially hyperbolic and fantastic make-believe imagery, by adducing their ability to evoke wonder in the listener. By doing so, they shifted their judgment of poetry from a truth-based scale, to one that is based on an experience of wonder, which results from novelty, strangeness, and the unexpected that can exist in the poetic form regardless of the truth or falsehood of its content. The chapter argues that an aesthetic of wonder is inherent in the very structure of many of the rhetorical figures, including those identified by critics beyond al-Jurjānī, namely, al-Sakkākī, and al-Khaṭīb al-Qazwīnī.

The Preface briefly discusses and qualifies basic vocabulary central to the topic of the book, including the terms “medieval,” “classical,” “Arabic,” “literary,” “poetic,” “eloquent,” “literature,” “poetics,” “rhetoric,” “theory,” and “criticism.”

Between 1780 and 1830, a highly distinctive body of imaginative writing emerged in Ireland, formed by and in turn helping to mould the linguistic, political, historical, and geographical divisions characteristic of Irish life. The intense and turbulent creative effort involved bore witness to a key transition at the beginning of the nineteenth century: the emergence of modern Irish literature as a distinct cultural category. During these years, Irish literature came to consist of a recognisable body of work, which later generations could draw on, quote, anthologise, and debate. This chapter offers a new map of the making of Irish literature in the romantic period, as well as introducing the aims of the volume as a whole.

The Introduction sets out the ‘problem’ and ‘paradox’ of counsel in regard to the ‘monarchy of counsel’ in England between the end of the Wars of the Roses and the English Civil War. On the one hand, it was a long-standing requirement that monarchs receive counsel in order to legitimize their rule. On the other, this condition had the potential to undermine their authority if the monarch was required to act on the counsel given. In other words, if counsel is obligatory, it impinges upon sovereignty. If it is not, it then becomes irrelevant and futile. The Introduction also provides justification of the scope of the study by providing some classical and medieval background.

This chapter explores what visitors would have seen at the sanctuary and how its setting and built environment would have shaped their experiences at the site more broadly. It begins with an archaeologically grounded reconstruction of the sanctuary and its monuments. It then uses this reconstruction to discuss Aquae Sulis’s dual role as a classicizing, monumentalized, space, and a space outside the normal bounds of lived existence, with aspects of a pilgrimage destination.

This chapter argues that McCarthy’s first four novels, which are lumped together and called his “Tennessee period,” can be characterized by an engagement with the literary attributes of allusion and allegory, particularly allegories of and allusions to hallmarks of Western culture, such as classical drama, Judeo-Christian theology, pastoral idealism, and the symbolic allegory of Romanticism. This chapter further argues that one can see an evolution in these four novels in how McCarthy invokes allegory and allusion, an evolution that progresses from a modernist stance towards industrialism to a wider questioning of the stability of cultural meaning. In the first two novels, this chapter argues, McCarthy uses allusion to signal a simpler time lost in twentieth-century American modernity. In the second two novels, McCarthy uses the literary tropes of allegory and allusion to question meaning and authority more generally, as allusions and even rituals become simulations of meaning and artifacts become empty markers of a past significance that are stripped from their cultural foundation.

Notions of decadence, decline, and decay are intrinsically linked to the history of art. The discipline’s three recognized forefathers ? Giorgio Vasari, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and Heinrich Wölfflin ? all relied on the concept of decadence (and its antonym, progress) to make sense of the history of the visual arts and to evaluate the art of their times. A developmental model of art was central to the interpretative schemes of these art historians. In this organicist model, earlier developments prepare the stage for what comes later; and after a particular style flourishes for a time, its decline is inevitable as newer styles overtake it. Decadent artists such as Gustave Moreau and Aubrey Beardsley mock aesthetic standards and moral rules, precluding universal appreciation, and proudly so. Decadent artists and decadent audiences are estranged from their society and feel disdain for those who are scandalized by decadent art’s innovative form and immoral subject matter.

The idea of decadent music may be as old as music itself, dating back at least to classical antiquity. This chapter offers a history of the concept from the classical period through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the eighteenth century, before concentrating on the explosion of the idea across Europe from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Classical writings often invoke a model of music that can be understood as proto-decadent ? for which read morally ‘bad’, formally flawed, hyper-affective, enervating, or corrupting in some way ? even if the term itself is not used. Then, as later, decadent music was perceived and defined by its effect on its listeners or by its formal properties, as Nietzsche understood Wagnerian opera in the nineteenth century. Music, it seems, has always been understood to contain the potential to disrupt and contaminate itself and its audience, requiring aesthetic, social, even state control ? control articulated via the idea of decadence.

In keeping with the nature of the Cambridge Critical Concepts series, the introduction establishes decadence as a concept. We show how the concept emerges from a combination of etymology and history, and how decadence cuts across and calls into question traditional literary categories, such as genre and periodization. We articulate the relevance of decadence to recent literary interests, such as gender politics and queer theory. Finally, we explain the rationale for the organization of the volume as an effort to ‘scale up’ and reset the parameters of decadence as a concept; preview the individual contributions to the collection; and clarify the structure of the volume: the origins of the concept of decadence, its development through nineteenth-century fields, and its application to various twentieth-century disciplines and literary modalities. The introduction concludes with commentary on the contemporary resonance of decadence today.