The disappearing danseur

“Musical Expression in the Bournonville-Løvenskjold La Sylphide Variation” brings musique dansante into the purview of dance historiography, explains how it works, and shows how it informs us about the dancing of the past. Generally dismissed as light, tuneful, but ultimately insubstantial accompaniments to forgotten ballets, this hoary musical tradition bears re-examination. The music of specialist ballet composers deserves further study, as these artists were highly successful in their ability to write music that imitates, reflects and supports the kinesthetic properties of the danse d’école. The musico-choreographic analysis of the first Sylph variation of La Sylphide offers a detailed exposition of structure and phrasing, including specific terms such as melody, meter and articulation.

A Couple of Soles: A Comic Play from Seventeenth-Century China

British colonial settler narratives of the nineteenth century comprise creative prose writing set in settler spaces that were under British rule during this time period. The term chiefly refers to narratives that were written by emigrants and settlers, as well as travelers and returnees. Traditionally, scholarship on British settler colonialism centers on the individual literary histories of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Recent research reconsiders emigration and settler writing in the larger context of a global nineteenth century. Thus, comparative studies of the experience and representation of settlement throughout the British Empire have begun to open up new venues to explore settler narratives. Transatlantic and transoceanic approaches have helped to highlight the circulation of cultural formations across the globe at the time. Simultaneously, studies reading settler and metropolitan, or British-based, fiction in tandem have facilitated a new consideration of genre and form, allowing us to recognize the hitherto underestimated contribution of British settler narratives to genre developments. In addition, important critical work has been done in the areas of gender and domesticity as well as of empire and race, although more research needs to be undertaken on the representation of Indigenous peoples in colonial settler narratives. More recently, ecocriticism has emerged as an illuminating theoretical framework to reinvestigate settler colonialism and the narratives it produced at a time of rapid industrialization and global expansion. While these approaches have brought unexplored aspects of settler narratives to light, renewed attention to often hitherto marginalized works has had an important impact on reconsiderations of the global nineteenth century. British colonial settler narratives provide different perspectives on imperialism, globalization, and the encounter with Indigenous populations. In addition, the gradual expansion of a canon of settler writing provides insight into the experience of women, who often turned to and thereby transformed different genres of writing. Thus the still seldom discussed domestic settler fiction deliberately upends narratives of exploration and adventure. As these contrasting texts exemplify, record, and at times constructively complicate the circulation of literary culture, they prompt us to reexamine how the globe was drastically reshaped through mass emigration and settler cultures that deliberately transformed the environment.

The Italian agriculture in the 19th century enjoyed a quite poor reputation among historians, for its innovative record. This article deals with a possible counterexample, the wide diffusion of steam threshing since the 1870s. It was a highly capital-intensive machine, and thus its success seems to contrast with the scarcity of capital, which plagued the Italian agriculture. Indeed, the pattern of diffusion in time and space was influenced by the cost of capital, but the constraint was eased by outsourcing. Steam-threshers were owned by specialised entrepreneurs and rented to farmers and landowners. This successful institutional arrangement casts a lot of doubt on the negative effects of the alleged institutional rigidity on technical change.

Reviewed by: The Musical as Drama: A Study of the Principles and Conventions behind Musical Shows from Kern to Sondheim Elizabeth A. Wells The Musical as Drama: A Study of the Principles and Conventions behind Musical Shows from Kern to Sondheim. By Scott McMillin. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. [xvi, 230 p. ISBN-10 0-691-12740-1; ISBN-13 978-0-691-12730-9. $24.95.] Illustrations, bibliography, index. Rarely does a book come along that seems to elegantly summarize what has come before while taking its subject to the next level. The Musical as Drama by Scott [End Page 79] McMillin is just such a book. Published in the last year of the author's life, this volume encapsulates an entire career's reflection on the nature and structure of musical theater. Although he doesn't advance any one overarching thesis, McMillin looks at musical theater as a dramaturgical phenomenon, not searching for organic unity within works but instead exploring the incongruities and disjunctions that form one of the central tensions in musical theater. Taking examples from among the best known and best loved shows in the repertoire, McMillin successfully argues for a more subtle reading of musical theater works as products of a collaborative process, and, as he asserts, the most important form of drama produced so far in America. Scholarship on musical theater has tended towards studies of individual works (bruce mcclung's Lady in the Dark: A Biography of a Musical [New York: Oxford University Press, 2007]) or, more commonly, studies of the works of one composer (Stephen Banfield's Sondheim's Broadway Musicals [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993]), or one issue (lesbian and feminist reality in Stacy Wolf's A Problem like Maria [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002], or Jewish identityin Andrea Most's Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical [Cambridge, MA: Harvard Universtiy Press, 2004]). Alternatively, a number of books have come out in recent years that provide a broader narrative of Broadway appropriate as textbooks (Joseph Swain, The Broadway Musical: A Critical and Musical Survey [New York: Oxford University Press, 1990] or Geoffrey Block, Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical from Showboat to Sondheim [New York: Oxford University Press, 1997] for example). Rarer is this kind of study, which takes a critical and dramaturgical look at a number of important musicals from different historical eras, and advances ideas about how the disunities of the genre function dramatically, and how music and text and staging make the musical "work" in the theater. As McMillin notes, "I am not aware of a book that brings the musical before us as an aesthetic entity, a genre of drama with definable conventions around which one can think about the musical as a form of art." (pp. ix–x). McMillin also poses a crucial question: "There is a challenge involved, and it is offered to the universities: are we in universities able to use our methods of analysis—historical, musical, literary, philosophical —and still get this form of popular entertainment right?" (p. xi) Certainly if musical theater history has had a weak spot, it is that few scholars can be adept in all of these areas at the same time and conduct research that adequately addresses the multifariousness of the genre while at the same time representing it realistically. One of the central issues in musical theater history has been the extent to which musicals of different eras are "integrated," i.e., the extent to which the various elements of the musical belong together. McMillin dismisses to a certain degree this emphasis—born from organicist and in some ways European models of looking at opera—as inadequate for dealing with the way in which musical theater works operate. Bringing to bear on his analyses are a number of thinkers, including Joseph Kerman, Brecht, Wagner, and Kierkegaard. More prevalent is his borrowing of aspects of narrativity from Carolyn Abbate, who is best known for her work on opera, particularly the music dramas of Wagner (see her Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991]). Specifically, he borrows Abbate's idea of the "voice of the opera" as...

En el mundo flamenco, existe la suposición de que los cantes flamencos contienen unas letras esencialmente líricas que no narran, sin embargo, hay ciertas modalidades, como los cantes a palo seco denominados tonás y martinetes, cuyos soportes literarios derivan de textos más largos y narrativos. Para demostrar que esta consideración es el resultado de un largo proceso de trasformación, se analizan los escritos sobre tonás y martinetes y se compara el contenido de sus coplas con las descripciones de ciertos hechos históricos. En múltiples casos coinciden los fragmentos, aunque sean muy breves, con determinados acontecimientos reales, lo que se puede interpretar como un indicio de que las letras efectivamente derivan de unos textos de romances noticiosos, narrando sobre asuntos carcelarios y la persecución de los gitanos. Uno de los hechos concretos constituye la Prisión General de los Gitanos, realizada en 1749, incluyendo su preparación y sus consecuencias. Así, esta propuesta de buscar el origen de los martinetes, más que en una forma musical, en las letras primitivas, adopta la perspectiva de considerar a los martinetes unos cantos que se han originado como textos narrativos orales, compuestos por los mismos afectados de la medida política sobre la mitad del siglo XVIII y que posteriormente se han convertido, dentro del marco de la cristalización de la cultura musical del flamenco en el siglo XIX, en coplas musicales, asociadas a determinadas melodías del cante a palo seco.

This research shows gender inequality in the drama Mother Courage and Her Children, feminism dominates the male role. With this domination Mother's courage lived in the nineteenth century, when patriarchal customs were still firmly held by the community. Women were still enslaved by male superior and the character of the Mother Courage opposes her domination by doing various struggles. This research uses feminist existentialism (Beauvoir S. , 1949) encourages women to step outside the boundaries and social circles that make them lose their freedom for themselves. This research is a qualitative research that produces descriptive data. This study uses content analysis techniques, starting with looking for similarities in data, combining them into a single unit in subchapters, critical and evaluative studies with the help of Beauvoir's social theory. The researcher's findings regarding the movements described in the play "Mother Courage and Her children" are as follows: In the study of women's struggles, Simone de Beauvoir's theory is highly valued because women are involved in various struggles in an effort to overcome themselves. The result show women can improve themselves in the face of gender inequality that is driven by men. This shows when women struggle to prove that women are capable of working, intellectually capable, capable of being fearless women and also able to resist public policies.

From One Medium to the Next: How Comic Books Create Richer Storylines

Book reviewed in this article:Lilly Lindquist. A Laboratory Course in General Language.Edwin Greenlaw. The Province of Literary History. The Johns Hopkins Monographs in Literary History, I.B. M. Woodbridge. Le Roman Belge Contemporain.H. E. Berthon. Nine French Poets 1820–1880. With an introduction on the structure of French verse and explanatory notes.Gustave Flaubert, Trois Contes.Ernest Pérochon. Le Livre des Quatre Saisons. Edited with introduction, notes and vocabulary by Leland L. AtwoodFables of La Fontaine. Edited with Introduction, Notes, and Vocabulary, by Colbert Searles.Henri de Bornier. La Fille de Roland. Pièce en 4 actes en vers.Victor Hugo. Notre Dame de Paris. Abridged and edited with introduction, notes, exercises, and vocabulary, by Laurence Hervey Skinner.Jean de la Brète. Aimer Quand Même. Edited, with preface, introduction, notes, exercises, and vocabulary by C. F. Zeek.Pierre Loti. Pêcheur d'Islande. Edited with notes and vocabulary, by James F. Mason and exercises by O. T. RobertLabiche et Martin. Le Voyage de M. Perrichon, edited by M. L. Carrel, with introduction, notes, exercises and vocabulary.H. E. Ford and R. K. Hicks. A New French Reader.Hodges‐Nelson‐Vestal. Toujours Français, Cours Elémentaire.German Plays of the Nineteenth Century. Edited, with Introduction and notes by Thomas Moody Campbell.Hans Franck. Der Regenbogen. Edited with introduction, exercises, notes, and vocabulary by S. M. Hinz.

In this article we seek comment on the main writers of novels of the nineteenth century in Portugal. Almeida Garrett, Alexandre Herculano and Camilo Castelo Branco each representing one of Romanticism narrative aspect, while Eca de Queiroz, realistic, presents us with a fourth possibility narrative. The historical, social and cultural features of Portugal are present in each of their novelists, however, with specific in their treatment of the same features.

Men and psychology have a somewhat awkward relationship. From its earliest days in the last quarter of the nineteenth century until its mature age in the 1960s, psychology was largely concerned with studying one half of humankind: men. The people who provided the data by participating in psychological experiments were mostly of the male sex, and so was the majority of psychologists reporting about these experiments. As a matter of consequence, a male bias could be discerned in the theories that were advocated, and the topics that were investigated. But, despite the overrepresentation of men in psychology, men were hardly ever studied as men . They were generally seen as representatives of the human species and treated as if they had no gender (Kimmel & Messner, 1989). Ironically, it took the feminist criticism of the male bias in psychology before a substantial psychology of men was developed. In the 1970s a number of psychologists pioneered in this new field using bits of psychological knowledge to understand masculinity. Most of them were concerned with consciousness raising in accordance with the political aims of their feminist sisters: emancipation required as many personal and structural changes in the lives of men as in women's lives. In academic research, psychologists undertook empirical analyses of the vicissitudes of the male role. In clinical settings, new therapies were developed that confronted men with their personal behavior under patriarchy.

The article is devoted to the Camille Saint-Saëns ballet Javotte. This ballet is considered in the context of the development of the French choreographic theater of the late XIXth century. The author briefly reviews the history of the productions of Javotte in different cities (Lyon, Royan, Paris) and specifies the information about the authors of the choreography in each version. Based on critical responses related to performances at the turn of the century, it is proved that the tradition of playing male roles by travesty dancers was not common even at that time. The performance of the role of Jean in the ballet Javotte by male dancer confirms this thesis (Lyon, 1896 — Jean Soyer de Tondeur; Paris, 1909 — Léo Staats). It is concluded that the plot of the ballet continues the tradition of the comic ballet, while musically (along with many scores of other French ballets) it starts a series of ballets of the XXth century, striving for miniaturization and unity of musical development. The article uses a rare graphic material that visualizes the production of Javotte.