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This introductory chapter points out how grievously scholars have neglected popular influences on classical music. It challenges the tradition of ‘homage musicology’, whereby musical analysis is seen as a gesture of reverence towards the great composers. The banal, commonplace, or third-rate are equally worthy of study, and historically at least equally important. Further, the chapter introduces the main theoretical theme of the book: melody and its patterns, as found particularly in the simplest and most spontaneous music. Everything else — harmony, polyphony, and tonality — is an elaboration on these.

Since J. M. Coetzee's writing often concerns itself with both classic texts and the problematics of translation, the question as to his view of the relation between translation and the classic arises. This chapter argues that this relation, for Coetzee, entails a view of translation as both homage to and critique of the classic text. The argument commences with a consideration of the essay ‘What Is a Classic?’. After defining the classic relationally rather than essentially, Coetzee concludes by positing criticism of the classic as a prerequisite of its survival. Thus, the relation of translation — itself a form of criticism (Benjamin) — to the classic is marked by what Derrida terms ‘hostpitality’: hostility-as-hospitality. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Coetzee's practice as translator (of a sonnet sequence by Achterberg) that points to the intricate identification of self-aware critique and homage in the relation between translation and the classic.

This chapter explores in more detail the transformation in tenure consequent on William's conquest. It concentrates on the writings of Eadmer of Canterbury who revealed a particularly acute understanding of the tenurial changes which the Conquest had entailed. He saw that prelates as well as laymen held their lands of the king in a new way — a way which he regarded as sacrilegious. This novel personal and tenurial bond was created by homage. The chapter proceeds to explore these changes more broadly by reference to Domesday Book, charters, and writs, and most notably Henry I's coronation charter. It argues that the king's position as the only lord who was not in turn a tenant is the most potent and neglected consequence of the Conquest.

This chapter offers some final thoughts on the study as a whole, and an encouragement to the reader to continue to approach action cinema in a sophisticated way in the face of popular cultural and marketing discourses that seek to simplify its appeal.

The late appearance of documents which detail dependence, such as the indenture, may obscure the ancient nature of the institution itself. Scottish ‘bonds of manrent’ demonstrate the endurance of the personal bond of lordship as does the persistence of the ceremony of swearing homage and fealty. Dependence was ultimately personal in nature and relied on the promise of protection from the lord. If exercised effectively, lords could rely on it to control local areas and protect them in times of political turmoil. They distributed their livery even to judges, but contemporary criticism of this practice needs to be modified. The same is true for the lord's affinity which is often discussed in the context of ‘bastard feudalism’, and for the practice of ‘maintenance’, that is the improper support offered by a lord to his man in his disputes (legal or otherwise) with others.

This chapter follows the development of Ezra Pound's modernist poetry as it responds to the culture of Great War Britain. As an American in London, Pound is alert to the postures of the partisan press of Liberal England, and as a former colonial, he animates powerfully to the self-contradictory language of the former imperial power. His response to the verbal culture of war-time journalism informs the multi-part review he serialized through 1917 in the New Age, “Studies in Contemporary Mentality”. The “seeming reason” he locates as the tone of the political times is answered in his own poetry with a style of mock logic or sham rationality that is new to his developing opus. This tone is heard as the major development in his creative translation, Homage to Sextus Propertius, in his fictional autobiographical sequence, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), and in the initial installments of his emergent life-work, The Cantos.

The process of adapting the works of Jules Verne to movies and television is hardly at an end after more than a century. The peak years of Verne film production and importation in the United States, the 1950s through the 1970s, is receding into the distance, but the product of that cycle is more widely viewed than ever, with television replaying these many movies almost endlessly, thus amplifying their impact. Enough time has passed for several generations to have received their initial impression and knowledge of Verne from these media renderings. Such an introduction implies the formation of preconceptions and expectations that will inevitably shape how Verne books are subsequently read and received. Verne has become an author whose reputation has been shaped to a large degree by filmmakers, being transformed into a legend not always related to the concerns of his books. Verne films demonstrate the reverse impact that the process of adaptation has on literature, forming the way an author is understood. As such, they are a vital part of the worldwide Verne phenomenon and have become one with the larger Vernian text known by readers everywhere.

This very short chapter works as a sort of homage to McGahern the generous friend, writer and interviewee. Taking as a starting point an interview conducted by Melvyn Bragg for the then newly-formed BBC2, in 1966, the chapter throws light on those early years when McGahern was merely a newcomer. It gives glimpses into McGahern’s personality, as well as the interest and respect he invoked in others, but mostly it offers memories of moments, places, people, phrases uttered – all of which bring alive both McGahern the writer and the man at the beginning of his writing life.

Since at least the time of Dryden, a ‘dead’ translation has been a bad one. But during the nineteenth century, poets became interested in the expressive possibilities of a dead style: Browning is one example. Pound's recorded statements on translation generally assert the need to ‘present’ a ‘vivid personality’ or ‘bring a dead man to life’. But the idea that something from the past might become ‘present’ again is complex, and results in a poetry of translation which is as interested in deadness as in life. I trace this aspect of Pound's writing through his translations of Cavalcanti, Cathay and Homage to Sextus Propertius. The conflict owes something to wider modernist concerns; but it is fuelled by the activity of translation.

This chapter shows that ‘Billet’ is more than just a poetic letter praising an ephemeral English review. It is also a homage to James McNeill Whistler, whom Mallarmé viewed as the living embodiment of his fellow American, Edgar Allan Poe.

This chapter tells three parallel stories about William Shakespeare's Hamlet, each of which could fit under the general rubric of “Hamlet, Repetition, and Revenge.” It begins with Edward Gordon Craig and his complicated relation to the play, then moves on to a story about the scholar John Dover Wilson (the textual editor of the Cranach Hamlet), and finally to another story involving a literary scholar, J. I. M. Stewart, who, moonlighting as detective novelist “Michael Innes,” was the author of a mystery called Hamlet, Revenge! Each of these inset narratives turns on a book: a book that incarnates the idea of Hamlet—the play—as repetition and revenge. The chapter argues that there are times when revenge takes the form of homage, and homage takes the form of revenge. It also suggests that there is something about Hamlet—the Hamlet effect—that not only generates this cycle, but also, ultimately, casts the play itself in the position of the revenger.

Looks at the death of Blanchot’s colleague Claude Séverac and his written homages to her. Relates these to his later writing, notably Death Sentence, and reflects more broadly on changes in Blanchot’s thinking around this period.

This chapter examines how Stranger Things remains an ode to the 1980s despite deviating from its source material, 1980s film. Despite being influenced by key cultural movements, Stranger Things remains an ode to the 1980s because its creators, the Duffer brothers, chose to focus on the experiences and values of Gen X. Stranger Things is a homage to the generation in which the creators came of age.

This chapter analyzes De Palma's first feature film, The Wedding Party, which was shot in winter 1964 and summer 1965, but released in 1969, after the success of his 1968 film, Greetings. The film was autobiographical in that its events were inspired by the wedding of Jared Martin, who had been De Palma's roommate at Columbia University, along with William Finley. De Palma and Finley served as groomsmen at these nuptials, which were held on a Long Island estate in 1963, the year before shooting began. The chapter looks at De Palma's enthusiastic experimentation with film techniques and his homages to two of the masters of cinema, Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock, as well as the relationships and life experiences that have their echoes within the film's characters and storyline, in building up the portrait of a young director's feature-film debut.

This chapter argues that over four decades Cruising evolved from a ‘film maudit’ to an international cult hit. Even the soundtrack LP developed a cult following, with the title song appearing in Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof. Cruising has also been spoofed as well as referred to in the homage Interior, Leather Bar by James Franco.