Today, the Treatise is Hume’s most well-known work. But that was not so in the eighteenth century. Hume could even famously claim that his Treatise “fell dead-born from the press.” Still, modern scholarship has shown that the Treatise had a more significant early reception than Hume’s comment suggests. This chapter sheds new light on the reception of Hume’s Treatise in eighteenth-century Britian. It surveys the existing historiography and considers Hume’s relevant surviving correspondence. But it also explores overlooked dimensions of the Treatise’s early reception, partly by employing data mining in electronic databases, particularly Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). Analyzing that data in various ways, we illuminate new dimensions of this topic. They include unpacking close engagements by familiar figures, like Lord Kames; casting light on the many who invoked, critiqued, anthologized, or otherwise absorbed and broadcast the Treatise; and identifying the larger trends of eighteenth-century reuse to which all of those individual stories contributed.

Considering Ennius’ Hedyphagetica in its contexts of sympotic celebration, this chapter contends that some later Roman authors – namely, Lucilius, Horace, Catullus, Lucretius, and Persius – think of Ennius as a seafood specialist. They have, it suggests, an eye on his Hedyphagetica’s relationship with his Annales as one whereby both poems come packaged together in the reception of the older mainland Italian poet.

This pithy Introduction justifies the existence of the volume and explains why its contributors do not apply the term “minor works” to Ennius’ corpus. It then provides an overview of the diversity of this corpus, zooming in on the remains of his comedy as an example of what is not quite lost, and briefly shows that Ennius deeply influenced the Roman literary tradition as a multiform author (not just as an epicist). The Introduction closes by explaining the dispensation of the volume and what its contributors achieve.

This chapter argues that Ennius began his epic poem, the Annales, by boasting about his non-epic literary accomplishments, in particular his Saturae. It proceeds to corroborate this view by demonstrating that Ennius’ non-epic and non-tragic corpus – his Saturae, Sacra historia, Scipio, Sota, Epicharmus, and Hedyphagetica – continued to be read and engaged with by important Latin figures (e.g., Terence, Virgil, Apuleius, Lactantius) for hundreds of years. Multiplicity was key, therefore, both to Ennius’ self-representation and to his long Roman reception.

This chapter examines the changing reception of Charles Harpur’s poetry. Firstly, it considers the valuing of Harpur as a nature poet, and secondly, the impact of literary theory on interpretative approaches. It then outlines a third phase that is text-historical or text-critical, and which is attentive to the poems’ multiple moments of composition and revision. The chapter discusses Harpur’s navigation of colonial readership, and how he experimented with a range of voices. It includes an examination of his translations that are related, in part, to Harpur’s fascination with the role of the poet and with other poets, such as Coleridge.

This chapter seeks to demonstrate that the Nag Hammadi text is indeed the text referred to by Irenaeus, thus establishing its relatively early date. While confirming Irenaeus’s claim that this work was popular within the Valentinian tradition he regards as heretical, it is argued that Valentinian usage of this text does not imply a Valentinian origin.

Louise Farrenc grew up in Paris during the Revolutionary period that saw the rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte and of different monarchies in France. These political changes impacted the Parisian musical scene and influenced Farrenc’s career and that of her friends and colleagues. Farrenc began her career as a virtuoso pianist-composer writing popular works like sets of variations on opera melodies and folksongs, but at the end of the 1830s, she changed her musical path. In the 1840s, like many composers in Central Europe at the time, she abandoned the virtuoso music of her youth to write chamber music with and without piano as well as three symphonies. She became known as a composer of serious music, an upholder of “German” traditions in France, and critics wrote about her compositions as representing the best new music of France. Her Nonet for Winds and Strings provides a culmination of the work she had done up to that point as a composer and performer devoted to finding a “middle way” between the Classical and Romantic traditions.

Every composer makes distinct emotional, intellectual, and somatic demands on performers. These demands are written into the notes, asking our bodies to take particular shapes and execute specific, sometimes unique, actions, and our minds to understand particular ways of organising sound. I will suggest that our habits of thought regarding these demands are profoundly shaped by cultural constructions of the figure of the composer, as well as by more palpable influences such as current performance practices and lineages of teaching. Some of these habits of thought – especially ways of analysing the notes or understanding how a work fits into an oeuvre – are consciously learned and deployed. Some are less consciously absorbed from the conventional wisdom that attaches to composers concerning their biographies, characters, or the characteristics of their music.

It is the winter of 2021. Like many parents around the world, I have donned the new hat of home-school administrator. My children are high-school age, so they resist oversight (as expected), but I have come to see that they do not need much (who knew?). My role is simply to find suitable remote-learning resources. Again, I am pleasantly surprised, and relieved: high-school level art history, for example, seems to be an especially engaging subject online, given the potential for abundant accurately coloured images, flexible user interfaces, and up-to-date critical content. This happy realisation hits me as I notice that the unfamiliar hat has slipped off the side of my head: I am no longer surveying the resources for the kids’ sakes, but rather I am absorbed, of my own accord, in a lesson on Fauvism.

Musicologists have started to engage critically with the international reach of Haydn’s music and the claims of ‘universal language’. Miguel Ángel Marín has shown that Haydn was a significant virtual presence in Spain; Thomas Tolley has explored Carpani’s assertions that Haydn composed a ‘New World’ symphony; W. Dean Sutcliffe has documented the discovery of three autographs from Haydn’s Op. 50 in Australia; and Peter Walls considers The Creation in colonial New Zealand. Melanie Wald-Fuhrmann has stepped back to consider the style, aesthetics, and ideas behind the claims of universality; and Nicholas Mathew has discussed what it meant for Haydn and his music to go abroad as a cultural product in the composer’s era.

The last musicologist to see the original canon-pictures was apparently Eusebius Mandyczewski, who says: ‘At Eisenstadt [the Esterházy family’s principal residence] there are still [1891] preserved Haydn’s presentation canons – as copies – in slender wooden frames, those that he hung on the walls of his room.’ Mandyczewski, a Haydn authority, recognised that the hand in the canon-pictures was not the composer’s, strengthening a claim made in 1811 by Johann Elßler, Haydn’s servant and copyist, that he had copied their music directly from autographs. Mandyczewski’s observation that the frames were ‘slender’ suggests that Haydn adopted a style of framing favoured by collectors of prints, which the composer would have seen in London and which was much imitated in Germany in the later eighteenth century.

Joseph Haydn’s Il ritorno di Tobia (Hob. XXI:1) has had a complicated reception since its first performance on 2 April 1775 at the semi-annual concerts of Vienna’s Tonkünstler-Societät. Despite its highly praised ‘fiery’ choruses and virtuosic arias, the work was criticised for its length, difficulty, and even monotony. Haydn and others attempted to correct the work’s ‘faults’ – leading to the oratorio’s existence in multiple versions. It seems unfair, however, to critique Haydn’s Tobia oratorio in isolation, without considering local precedents and its original multifaceted context: an audience following a libretto (with stage directions) based on a well-known biblical story; an event raising funds for musicians’ families; a musical dramatisation exploiting through demanding arias the virtuosity of its vocal soloists; and performance in a nearly five-hour ‘multimedia’ concert that included other works.

Haydn’s last opera, L’anima del filosofo (The soul of the philosopher), is a highly unusual retelling of the Orpheus myth. Written for the London stage in 1791 to a libretto by Carlo Francesco Badini (c. 1730–1810), the opera was never staged then nor during the composer’s lifetime. Shut down in rehearsal and banished from performance, the opera never reached the stage of the Haymarket Theatre. As Haydn himself concluded, ‘Orfeo was, so to speak, declared contraband’ (‘Orfeo wurde, so zu sagen, als Contrebande erklärt’).

Hemingway’s work was well received from the moment he began to publish. Some of the key ways in which his work has been read were established from the beginning, as critics identified the core elements of Hemingway’s emergent style and as they responded to his resonant themes. Later generations of academic critics, however, brought to bear on Hemingway’s stories and novels the shifting frameworks that would emerge, become dominant, and linger residually in the institutions of literary studies. Chief among the frameworks that would enrich the reading of Hemingway’s work in subsequent decades were the attention to matters of gender and sexuality made legible by feminism and queer theory in the 1980s and 1990s and the attention to race as inextricable from the construction and focalization of Hemingway’s narratives in the 1990s and 2000s. Most recently, the rise of postcolonial studies, ecocriticism, and critical disability studies has enabled fresh readings of the work, readings that keep it alive in current cultural debates. Throughout these changes, attention to Hemingway’s achievements in narrative form continues to be important, and it is as a crafter of sentences, and of narratives from carefully constructed sentences, that Hemingway continues to influence fiction writers.

The ability to express and perceive vocal emotions plays an important role in social interactions. Notably, the encoding and decoding of emotions often occur in social interactions of persons of different ages, where speaker and listener characteristics dynamically shape the perception of emotion expressed in the voice. However, existing models of (emotional) voice processing have primarily focused on stimulus quality while accounting sparsely for person characteristics, such as speaker and listener age. Consequently, systematic research on the expression and perception of emotion in the voice across the lifespan is needed. Here, we provide a synopsis of how the perception and specifically the recognition of vocal emotions is modulated by the age of both speakers and listeners. First, we summarize what we currently know about human vocal tract development and age-related variations in voice acoustics. We then synthesize evidence on age-related changes in the expression and perception of vocal emotions. We conclude that the perception of emotion expressed in the voice is not only a matter of how one speaks but also of who speaks and who listens. A broader perspective on how the voice communicates emotions should be reflected in existing models and guide future research.

Schoenberg’s music has always attracted the avid attention of critics. Some ridiculed his music, especially at first, while others came to respond favourably to its modernist demands. This chapter explores trends in the critical reception of Schoenberg as they have varied across time and place, from his initial entry into the Viennese music world in the early 1900s, through the increasingly harsh, often antisemitic rejections he endured in the 1920s and 1930s, to his re-evaluation in the post-war years, particularly in the United States. In addition, it highlights the composer’s reactions to some of the harsher criticism he received.

Ezra Pound called Ulysses ‘a triumph in form’. In contrast, Holbrook Jackson deplored it as ‘chaos’, referring to ‘the arrangement of the book’ as ‘the greatest affront of all’. T. S. Eliot justified the ‘formlessness’ of Ulysses as a reflection of Joyce’s dissatisfaction with the novel form. Taking such comments as a springboard, this chapter attends to Ulysses’s capacity to produce pronounced effects of both form and formlessness, arguing that its longstanding position at the apex of the modernist canon is connected to this artful duality. Through its extensive intertextuality and practice of a gamut of generic forms, Joyce’s shape-shifting book invites its own critical insertion into ‘the tradition’. Simultaneously, it resists full absorption into any singular critical scheme through its flouting of expectations of stylistic unity and narrative closure. Ulysses achieves that exquisite balancing of pattern and disorder, or novelty and familiarity, that maximizes a work’s chance of being rated as ‘high art’. Yet its recognition as such was also considerably aided by the interpretations formulated by Joyce and his champions in the early days of the book’s reception.

If one measures O’Casey’s career as a dramatist from 1920, when the Abbey Theatre rejected his first two plays, until his death in 1964, that career was predominantly developed as an expatriate. From The Silver Tassie onwards, his plays were written in England, where a quarter of them were also staged for the first time. The first O’Casey production in England was Juno and the Paycock, which appeared at London’s Royalty Theatre between 16 November 1925 and 6 March 1926, and then transferred to the Fortune Theatre (for 198 performances in total). This chapter traces London productions of O’Casey’s work, examining the way in which particular works by O’Casey proved amenable to audiences in the English capital.

Sean O’Casey’s plays, both within his lifetime and afterwards, have been commonly associated with the major theatres of Dublin and London, but a rich performance history of O’Casey dramas, often the lesser-produced later plays and one acts, can be found on stages in Ireland outside of Dublin. This chapter shows how, in the decades that followed O’Casey’s death, Galway and Belfast saw a range of theatres, directors, actors, designers, and audiences, in both English and in Irish, engaging with O’Casey’s wide range of dramatic forms, writings, and styles.