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Displaced Chagos islanders are not only embroiled in political mobilisation and protest: they also participate in cultural expression in exile. This chapter illustrates how representations of a homeland in song lyrics and oral narratives have been transformed through experiences of displacement and relocation, and asks to what extent such transformed representations help or hinder political and legal struggles in exile. Focusing on the relationship between displacement and musical production, it reveals the changing structure and thematic content of Chagossian song lyrics by comparing the lyrics of songs composed by Chagos islanders while living on the colonial Chagos Archipelago with those composed by displaced Chagos islanders living in exile. The latter songs form part of an emergent collective historical imagination motivated by the political and legal struggles for compensation and the right to return to Chagos.

Chapter 5 considers the materiality of lyric poems, and discusses the coexistence of lyric song with the availability and circulation of lyric texts both within and outside Athens. The analysis presents the fifth-century literary and archaeological evidence on the existence of various kinds of books in everyday life, and distinguishes between public availability of (lyric) texts in Athenian book markets and copies owned by individuals in private book collections. No reference is ever made to book-rolls with lyric poetry in the market in our sources, and it is difficult to argue that lyric texts circulated widely in Athens. It is, however, possible that they were part of Athenian private collections. The discussion also concentrates on the sociology of lyric reception and transmission in democratic Athens. Our sources suggest that canonical sixth- and fifth-century lyric remained a favourite of the ‘elite’ and intellectuals, who would have preserved these poems as both text and song.

This chapter provides an extended inquiry into the psychodynamics of southern gospel. It identifies a reciprocal process of sentimental exchange in the music that sustains a surreptitious modernity within a fundamentalist culture. This dynamic operates just beneath the surface of consensus about the music and about evangelicalism as a structure of belief. Methodologically, the chapter draws on literary critical readings of song lyrics in relation to analysis of live performance and the music's fan culture. It shows how the music allows the individual to confront feelings of doubt, insecurity, fear, isolation, and general spiritual discontent—even or especially when these feelings might contradict orthodox doctrine—without ever putting the individual in direct, public conflict with orthodoxy. Ultimately, this chapter demonstrates how a shaky but workable pluralism takes hold within evangelical fundamentalism.

This chapter looks at how music and poetry meet in song. The ballad form is one way of recognising the continuity between genres, with its familiarity and narrative potential. Song also links music and poetry by the obvious means of making them collaborate directly with each other. But this is also where tensions between the two forms are most marked. Precisely because they must work most closely together, we see here the ways they struggle with each other: for example, in ongoing debate about the status of song lyrics. As well as such arguments about songs, makerly tensions exist within them, as music and words struggle for priority, and force each other into compromises.

Chapter 1 offers a sketch of lyric geography. It positions the poetic activities and movements of the lyric poets on a map of Greece and Magna Graecia, and presents lyric poetry in its environment of composition and performance. The first part places lyric poetry in its local and pan-Hellenic contexts, and takes into account the environment within which local, wandering, and pan-Hellenic lyric poets moved, and the patrons and communities for which they composed, foregrounding the song-types that prevail in certain periods and areas. The second part addresses the paradoxical status of Athens as the city that did not produce lyric, but still helped preserve it. Athens imports lyric poets for its festivals, and the discussion explores the manner in which non-Athenian lyric poets were chosen to participate in Athenian festivals and calls attention to the paradoxical absence from official Athenian records of the names of victorious lyric poets.

Giuseppe Verdi wrote operas. He did not add music to plays full of superficial philosophy or bogus psychology. Verdi carried on his drama by means of lyric song. His orchestra, it is true, has a wonderful sonority, but it is the voice on which he counts to elucidate the situation. Verdi realised that song can carry on a plot in a way which words alone can never do. A good example of this comes from the last Act of the Verdi opera, Rigoletto. This chapter also discusses Verdi's Requiem, which is a heap of contradictions. It gives the strongest proofs that there are no canons of art. Any right-minded musician who only knew the Requiem from description would certainly condemn it. Verdi frankly makes frequent use of such well-worn aids to excitement as the diminished seventh and the chromatic scale.

This chapter examines William Gibson's The Difference Engine, a collaboration with Bruce Sterling, as well as his screenplays, poetry, song lyrics, and nonfiction. Sterling used an irresistibly marketable concept for The Difference Engine: a novel by what he could describe as the two leading cyberpunk authors that would appealingly blend three popular subgenres of science fiction—cyberpunk, alternate history, and “steampunk” literature. Despite the prominence of cyberspace in his Sprawl trilogy, Gibson claimed that he has “never really been very interested in computers themselves.” This chapter first offers a reading of The Difference Engine before discussing Gibson's screenplays written for Hollywood in the late 1980s, including one for a proposed Alien 3 film and another for the film version of Johnny Mnemonic. It also considers Gibson's poems such as “The Beloved: Voices for Three Heads,” his ventures into writing song lyrics, and the approach he used in some of his later nonfiction works: looking at the real world in terms of science fiction, conveying that we indeed live in a science fiction world.

This chapter primarily treats the history and present status of comic books in Cambodia with occasional mentions of other types of comic art. It conforms to the evolution of the various regimes the country has endured since comics first appeared in the 1960s, and the effects those governments had upon comic books. The early history is provided by interviewee Uth Roeun, the father of Cambodian comics. The strange distribution system used to get comics to rural areas is described, as well as recent attempts to revive the “classics” through poor quality reprints. Also discussed are efforts to use comic books for development purposes, and the help received from French cartoonists and aficionadoes of comics such as John Weeks of Our Books, to keep the medium alive.