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This chapter outlines the history of Poland from the final loss of independence in 1795 to the November Uprising of 1830. Cultural developments taking place during the periods of the Duchy of Warsaw and Congress Kingdom are placed within their historical and economic contexts. Attention is given to the debate between the proponents of Classicism, supporting the rationalist ideology; and the supporters of Romanticism, headed by Mickiewicz who embrace idealism. Polish Romantic ideology is specifically manifested through the birth of the Slavophile doctrine, the restoration of Sarmatism, and efforts to construct and uphold national identity.

Professor Elizabeth M. Wilkinson was one of the greatest, and — across the whole spectrum of the humanities — one of the most highly regarded, scholars of German culture the United Kingdom has produced, in particular because of her illuminating work, both historical and theoretical, on German Classicism, which did much to bring home its living significance. All who knew her were impressed by the depth and breadth of mind that she brought to bear on her work. She is fondly remembered as a teacher of genius who combined in a uniquely charismatic way sheer intellectual excitement, tender (and patient) regard for the development of individual students, and a passionate — sometimes fierce — dedication to the resolution of first-order problems.

With his novel Marius the Epicurean (1885), Walter Pater moved the focus of his interest from Greek to Roman antiquity. In his reflections on historiography, his ideal of the hero as a man of feeling and his exploration of the sentimental register, Pater made use of an extensive range of English and European Romantic sources, from Wordsworth to Goethe, Rousseau, and Madame de Staël. His portrayal of Imperial Rome was likewise based on early nineteenth-century representations of the city as, at the same time, museum and cosmopolitan stage. By means of these intertextualities, the historical novel in Pater's hands becomes a vehicle for the study of the relationship between Romanticism and Classicism, providing us at the same time with an important document of the legacy of Romanticism in late nineteenth-century England.

This chapter examines the reception of Classics in the work Cahier d'un retour au pays natal by the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, and compares Césaire's engagement with the cultures of Greece and Rome to that of the Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite. By comparing how these two Caribbean poets from different generations, the one Francophone, the other Anglophone, have used Classics in their expression of black cultural identities, the chapter reviews the concept of black classicism — the idea that there is a coherent reception of Classics in different black traditions. Rather than simply rejecting or affirming black classicism, it is argued that the idea of dislocation / dys‐location is central to Caribbean classical receptions, as authors attempt to relate the different black cultures which are present in the region.

During the 1770s and 1780s, historical drama in Germany, much influenced by Shakespeare and Calderón, seemed to capture the prime place in the fictional portrayal of the past. Literary innovators in Germany directed their fire against the continuing influence of French Neo-Classicism, particularly in drama. The Sturm und Drang and early German Romanticism evoked medieval and popular themes and, despite obvious roots in the Enlightenment, pointed towards a revival of Christianity. Yet the debt to the original Greek Classics was never lost. Schiller’s ‘Wallenstein’ (1799) was a key work and opened the way for a reinterpretation of the traumatic Thirty Years’ War in Central Europe and Wallenstein’s role in it, whether in drama, history, or the novel. In 1869 the historian Ranke took up these themes. Kleist’s historical novella ‘Michael Kohlhaas’, of 1810 (four years before Scott’s ‘Waverley’), brought Martin Luther decisively into the story among the fictional characters. Although Goethe and Novalis also wrote novels, historical drama, poetry, and philosophy dominated the German scene. Even so, the influence of Romanticism became decisive in Western and Central Europe, and greatly influenced the historical novel.

Despite much discussion concerning the nature and purpose of Romanticism both at the time and afterwards, it took to the historical novel in a surge during the later 1810s and 1820s—partly under the influence of German origins, and partly due to the popularity of Scott’s novels. Nevertheless, Romanticism and the historical novel were two different phenomena. Sooner or later the latter would have to free itself from the former. The many contradictions in Romanticism passed into the historical novel. Strong interest in medieval themes, particularly where medieval liberties were contrasted with modern absolutism, represented one element; the influence of the French Revolution, early liberalism, and nationalism, other elements. Medieval historians such as Thierry acknowledged the influence of Scott. Balzac contrasted local Catholic resistance to Paris Revolutionaries in ‘Les Chouans’, again setting fictional characters in first place. Vigny and Mérimée, by contrast, placed historical characters at the centre of the action. Dumas developed the romance element in the historical novel and gained a wide and lasting popular audience through his entertaining writing and plots. Hugo and Dickens observed French and English mobs with a mixture of artistic delight and social revulsion.

The statue is a significant motif in many key films of the European modernist cinema of the 1950s and 1960s. Famous examples are Les Statues meurent aussi (Alain Resnais and Chris Marker, 1953), Viaggio in Italia (Roberto Rossellini, 1953), L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961), La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962), Jules et Jim (François Truffaut, 1962), Méditerranée ( Jean-Daniel Pollet, 1963), Le Mépris ( Jean-Luc Godard, 1963), Il Gattopardo (Luchino Visconti, 1963), Une Femme mariée ( Jean-Luc Godard, 1964), Gertrud (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1964), and Vaghe stelle dell’orsa (Luchino Visconti, 1965). Focusing on Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia (Journey to Italy, 1953) and Resnais’ L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year in Marienbad, 1961) as cases in point, this chapter not only traces the fascination for sculpture in modernist cinema but also explains it by examining the ways in which statues are presented as tokens of death, time, history, myth, memory, the human body, and strategies of doubling – important topics for many of the leading modernist directors working in the 1950s and 1960s.

Chapter 1 discusses the balance of classicism and romanticism as artistic and expressive underpinnings of Brahms’s style. Brahms was in many ways a composer for whom the past—even the distant past—was still very much alive. Yet he was remarkably innovative. He often used Classical-Era forms, but he adapted them to his expressive ends. He used harmonic progressions identical to those used in similar circumstances by composers of the Classical Era, but also used harmonies as adventurously as Wagner or Liszt. In terms of texture and of rhythm and meter, he was, if anything, more adventurous than many of his contemporaries. The chapter offers a detailed analysis of harmony, dissonance, melody, melodic evolution, texture, rhythm and meter, counterpoint, and developing variation in a single Brahms phrase (from the second theme of the first movement of the A-major Violin Sonata, op. 100). Brahms’s phrase is compared to and differentiated from a similar phrase opening the second theme in Beethoven’s Violin Sonata in A, op. 30, no. 2.

Chapter 3 studies in detail the first movements of Brahms’s three violin sonatas. Each first movement is cast in sonata form—the most exalted structure of the Classical Era. But Brahms did not fill a “sonata-form mold” with formulaic music. Just like his great predecessors whose music he so dearly loved and esteemed, Brahms adapted the outer aspects of the form and the contents of each section to express that movement’s unique musical narrative. The discussions of each movement explore the traits they all share as well as their individual Romantic features. The A-major Sonata’s first movement also provides an opportunity to explore musical allusions to other pieces and how that might affect our interpretations—both as performers and analysts.

Examines why the book is called Touchstones, moving from a close reading of some key moments in McGahern’s third novel, The Leavetaking where Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ is quoted and then onward to his essay, ‘The Study of Poetry’ in which he inaugurates the idea of the touchstone as a useful critical tool for the literary scholar. Also introduces the McGahern papers at NUI Galway which form an important plank for the research.

This concluding chapter analyzes how the diversity of Antonín Dvořák's audiences affected his string quartets. The strain of satisfying the disparate expectations of diverse audiences while attempting to establish himself as a composer of “universal” music in the tradition of German Classicism is most evident in Dvořák's string quartets. These works demonstrate his shrewdness in reading the musical climate and responding to it with appropriate stylistic choices that address not only the desire for exotic signifiers or their absence but also the types of engagement that listeners and performers would enjoy in different performance settings. The chapter then illuminates the features of Dvořák's earlier string quartets that indicate the composer's engagement with pervasive nineteenth-century string quartet traditions and his successful navigation of the rapidly changing chamber music culture in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

Chapter 1 discusses historical evidence regarding how Jews or ‘Hebrews’ and were imagined, represented, and encountered by Englishmen in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This chapter considers English attitudes towards Jews as well as Hebrew, the language most closely associated with the Jewish people; and argues that these encounters reflected complex, morally ambivalent responses that are not easily dismissible as flatly anti-Semitic, as some influential recent scholarship has insisted. Among the evidence this chapter discusses is Henry VIII’s solicitation of rabbinical opinion on the Great Matter of his divorce, the Classicist Robert Wakefield’s text Oratio de utilitate trium linguarum, English writers’ prefaces to their translations of Classical texts, and the inventor Simon Sturtevant’s instructional text Dibre Adam, or Adams Hebrew Dictionarie.

Combining Classicist aesthetics with Idealism’s focus on the validity of judgments, Goethe developed a response to Romantic organology, which was expressed in his reaction to the French Academy debate between Georges Cuvier and Étienne Geoffroy de St. Hilaire, and in debate with Hegel. Hegel accused Goethe of approaching the natural sciences “without organs,” and Goethe responded with what I call a “quasi-philosophy” of the organ aimed at a social transformation of the world as the task of natural science. Goethe’s biological Classicism combined with his philosophical Idealism to suggest a conflation of Hegel’s Absolute and Objective Spirits, and a kind of “transcendental technology,” based in the ancient discourse about the hand as the “tools of tools.” This would allow intervention in nature and render the human free.

In 1924, John Barrymore joined Warner Bros. to star in Beau Brummel, the Clyde Fitch play made famous by stage actor Richard Mansfield in 1890. Here, as this chapter explores, Barrymore fused elements of Classicism, Neo-Romanticism and Realism in his screen performance. In doing so, as the chapter suggests, Barrymore preserved the traditions of earlier generations of actors while modifying them for modern audiences and new technologies.

This chapter considers two phenomena, to cap the volume’s explorations of Athens and its story. The first is to gather the evidence for a broad phenomenon, which is contemporary with various shifts in the political culture of late Classical Athens, but overtakes it geographically and chronologically: a ‘great convergence’ of civic practice, institutions, and discourse around a generalized assumption of (acceptable degrees of) autonomy and moderate democracy. The result is a polis which looks, roughly, like Aristotle’s. This great convergence created the conditions out of which the Roman-era polis had to evolve, under its own conditions; the fitful forgetting of the legacy of the Hellenistic polis is the second topic of this paper, exemplified by Plutarch’s Classicism and Pausanias’ Hellenistic memories. ‘Whatever happened to Athens?’ is a question every Classicist should be aware of, since it determines the whole shape of what she is busy with.

Chapter 3 is about Carl Loewe, a little-known musician who undertook an unprecedented and remarkable task: improvising entire songs, both the melody and the accompaniment, on poems given to him by the audience. This chapter reconstructs Loewe’s methods for performing this difficult feat and describes the cultural impetuses that motivated it. I propose that Loewe’s improvisations, performed mainly on a series of concert tours he undertook in the 1830s, condensed a number of independent cultural strains—the kapellmeister’s fluency in keyboard improvisation, the practice of touring virtuosos, the literary cult of poetic improvisers, and the genre theory of the ballad, which described it as a species of epic or bardic narration that was understood as improvisatory in character.

The Introduction begins with a succinct factual account of Wilde’s classical ‘biography’, from his childhood and early schooling, through his years as a student at Trinity College Dublin and Magdalen College, Oxford, to his later literary success. It explains the novelty of, and the cause for, the broad interdisciplinary approach taken in this book, and argues that the contributed essays, dealing in multifaceted but complementary ways, add significantly to modern Wildean scholarship. The Introduction is intended as a guide to the themes covered in this collection and the links which unite them in their mission. It argues that Wilde’s classicism was crucial to his self-creation, to his taking control of his own myth, and that one of the most striking aspects of his classicism was his commoditization of the ancient world, his use of it in literary ‘products’ designed to be consumed by large middle-class audiences.

This chapter explores how the narrative of nineteenth-century music that was constructed in the early GDR by musicologists such as Georg Knepler, Harry Goldschmidt, and Ernst Hermann Meyer functioned as a form of national history, dealing in romance emplotments, positive heroes, and mythic struggles between good and evil. This model of history located the precedents for the socialist self and the capitalist other in classicism and romanticism respectively. The construct of the heroic Beethoven was heralded as a prototype for the socialist citizen, and a tradition of dialectical composition with its origins in classical sonata form, as the precursor to socialist realism. Romanticism, with its irrational, passive, and escapist tendencies was cast as the polar opposite to this. However, few of the major canonic composers were associated with this aesthetic. Instead, artists such as Brahms were classed as realists and incorporated into the prehistory of the state.