Explore metaphors in the exquisite and enigmatic poetry of Song of Songs
One of the chief difficulties in interpreting the Song's lyrics is the unusual imagery used to depict the lovers' bodies. Why is the maiden's hair compared to a flock of goats (4:1), the man’s cheeks likened to garden beds of spice (5:13), and the eyes of both lovers described as doves (4:1; 5:12)? While scholars speculate on the significance of these images, a systematic inquiry into the Song's body metaphors is curiously absent. Based on insights from cognitive linguistics, this study incorporates biblical and comparative data to uncover the meaning of these metaphors surveying literature in the eastern Mediterranean (and beyond) that shares a similar form (poetry) and theme (love). Gault presents an interpretation of the Song's body imagery that sheds light on the perception of beauty in Israel and its relationship to surrounding cultures.
Features
The first comprehensive study of the Song of Songs' use of military metaphors
Although love transcends historical and cultural boundaries, its conceptualizations, linguistic expressions, and literary representations vary from culture to culture. In this study, Danilo Verde examines love through the military imagery found throughout the Song’s eight chapters. Verde approaches the military metaphors, similes, and scenes of the Song using cognitive metaphor theory to explore the overlooked representation of love as war. Additionally, this book investigates how the Song conceptualizes both the male and the female characters, showing that the concepts of masculinity and femininity are tightly interconnected in the poem. Conquered Conquerors provides fresh insights into the Song's figurative language and the conceptualization of gender in biblical literature.
The emotional, epic story of James “Cornbread” Harris—a self-proclaimed “blessed dude” and one of Minneapolis’s most influential musicians
From the heart of the Minnesota blues comes the story of James “Cornbread” Harris Jr., the songwriter, pianist, and consummate bluesman whose seventy years making music helped to shape the Minneapolis Sound. “I am a blessed dude,” Cornbread tells Andrea Swensson, taking us along on his musical journey from a first “gig” entertaining his fellow soldiers during World War II to his subsequent years playing music for audiences across Minnesota. Following Cornbread’s extraordinary life story, Deeper Blues is a unique history of Minnesota music that evolves into a heartfelt tale of reconciliation and forgiveness, all to the tune of the legendary musician’s signature sound.
Cornbread’s career started in the 1950s, when he played with the Augie Garcia Quintet and cowrote their hit “Hi Ho Silver.” A tireless entertainer, he has been performing live ever since, influencing an entire generation of musicians credited with putting Minneapolis on the map in the 1980s—including his long-estranged son, Grammy-winning Rock and Roll Hall of Famer James “Jimmy Jam” Harris III. Going beyond the music, Deeper Blues turns toward family, atonement, and peace when Cornbread reunites with Jimmy Jam after a five-decade separation and they perform together on stage.
Through conversations with Cornbread, Jimmy Jam, and many others, Swensson reveals a story of perseverance and unfailing grace, a firsthand account of making music in the face of racism and segregation, and a hard-won acceptance of the personal sacrifices that are often required when dedicating one’s life to making music. As the man himself says, “All of my hardships ended up to be blessings.”
A rich mix of present-day anecdotes and historical vignettes, animated by voices from Cornbread’s life and the Twin Cities music scene, underscored by the bluesman’s original lyrics of heartache and hope, and featuring never-before-seen photographs of Cornbread and Jimmy Jam, Deeper Blues tells a singular story—one imprinted on the history, heart, and soul of the Minneapolis Sound.
Musical spectacles are excessive and abstract, reconfiguring time and space and creating intense bodily responses. Amy Herzog's engaging work examines those instances where music and movement erupt from within more linear narrative frameworks. The representational strategies found in these films are often formulaic, repeating familiar story lines and stereotypical depictions of race, gender, and class. Yet she finds the musical moment contains a powerful disruptive potential.
Dreams of Difference, Songs of the Same investigates the tension and the fusion of difference and repetition in films to ask, How does the musical moment work? Herzog looks at an eclectic mix of works, including the Soundie and Scopitone jukebox films, the musicals of French director Jacques Demy, the synchronized swimming spectacles of Esther Williams, and an apocalyptic musical by Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang. Several refrains circulate among these texts: their reliance on clichés, their rewriting of cultural narratives, and their hallucinatory treatment of memory and history.
Drawing on the philosophical work of Gilles Deleuze, she explores all of these dissonances as productive forces, and in doing so demonstrates the transformative power of the unexpected.
Here, for the first time, is a feast for anyone who has ever been beguiled by the trains that formerly thrummed through the landscapes of our lives. This entertaining and evocative anthology presents the amazing variety of poems and songs written about the American railroad in the last century and a half. Comprised of selections from both oral and written traditions, the volume celebrates the historical and cultural significance of this marvel of engineering skills. Hedin's anthology allows all readers, from the most avid railroad buff to anyone who has fond memories of train travel, to enjoy the romance of trains.
A moving and essential exploration of what it takes to find your voice as a woman, a survivor, an artist, and an icon.
The first time Lynn Melnick listened to a Dolly Parton song in full, she was 14 years old, in the triage room of a Los Angeles hospital, waiting to be admitted to a drug rehab program. Already in her young life as a Jewish teen in the 1980s, she had been the victim of rape, abuse, and trauma, and her path to healing would be long. But in Parton’s words and music, she recognized a fellow survivor.
In this powerful, incisive work of social and self-exploration, Melnick blends personal essay with cultural criticism to explore Parton’s dual identities as feminist icon and objectified sex symbol, identities that reflect the author’s own fraught history with rape culture and the arduous work of reclaiming her voice. Each chapter engages with the artistry and impact of one of Parton’s songs, as Melnick reckons with violence, misogyny, creativity, parenting, friendship, sex, love, and the consolations and cruelties of religion. Bold and inventive, I’ve Had to Think Up a Way to Survive gives us an accessible and memorable framework for understanding our times and a revelatory account of survival, persistence, and self-discovery.
Though viewed as quintessentially German, lieder became a centerpiece of nineteenth century song recitals in the United States. By the 1890s, these songs, which were often sung in English, were a sensation among tutored and untutored music lovers alike. Heather Platt examines the varied supporters and singers who both established the lied as a concert repertoire and shaped a new kind of recital dedicated to art songs. Lieder were embraced and spread by performers like Max Heinrich and advocates like John Sullivan Dwight, as well as by the women’s clubs that flourished nationwide. At the same time as examining the critical reception of the artists and songs, Platt reveals ways in which US recital programs anticipated trends in European recitals. She also places lieder against the backdrop of the time, when factors like the growth in the sheet music industry, the evolution of American art song, and emerging anti-German feeling had a profound impact on the genre’s popularity.
A cantor's son, Arlen believed his music was from a place outside himself, a place that also sent tragedy. When his wife became mentally ill and was institutionalized he turned to alcohol. It nearly killed him. But the beautiful songs kept coming: "Blues in the Night," "My Shining Hour," "Come Rain or Come Shine," and "The Man That Got Away."
Walter Rimler drew on interviews with friends and associates of Arlen and on newly available archives to write this intimate portrait of a genius whose work is a pillar of the Great American Songbook.
WINNER OF THE ELIZABETH AGEE PRIZE IN AMERICAN LITERATURE
A groundbreaking appreciation of Dylan as a literary practitioner.
The literary establishment tends to regard Bob Dylan as an intriguing, if baffling, outsider. That changed overnight when Dylan was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature, challenging us to think of him as an integral part of our national and international literary heritage. No One to Meet: Imitation and Originality in the Songs of Bob Dylan places Dylan the artist within a long tradition of literary production and offers an innovative way to understand his unique and often controversial methods of composition.
Dylan expert Raphael Falco traces the similarities between the way Dylan borrows, digests, and transforms traditional songs and what Renaissance writers called imitatio. Although Dylan’s lyrical postures may suggest an avant-garde consciousness, No One to Meet shows that Dylan’s creative process creatively expands methods used by classical and Renaissance authors.
Drawing on numerous examples, including Dylan’s previously unseen manuscript excerpts and archival materials, Raphael Falco illuminates how the ancient process of poetic imitation, handed down from Greco-Roman antiquity, allows us to make sense of Dylan’s musical and lyrical technique. By placing Dylan firmly in the context of an age-old poetic practice, No One to Meet deepens our appreciation of Dylan’s songs and allows us to celebrate him as what he truly is: a great writer.
“ONE OF THE SHARPEST, FUNNIEST, AND BEST BOOKS EVER ABOUT ANY ROCK ARTIST”—Rolling Stone
“WEIRD AND WONDROUS”—New York Times
“I ADORED IT”—Michael Chabon
A literary and visual exploration of the songs of Steely Dan.
Steely Dan’s songs are exercises in fictional world-building. No one else in the classic-rock canon has conjured a more vivid cast of rogues and heroes, creeps and schmucks, lovers and dreamers and cold-blooded operators—or imbued their characters with so much humanity.
Pulling from history, lived experience, pulp fiction, the lore of the counterculture, and their own darkly comic imaginations, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker summoned protagonists who seemed like fully formed people with complicated pasts, scars they don’t talk about, delusions and desires and memories they can’t shake. From Rikki to Dr. Wu, Hoops McCann to Kid Charlemagne, Franny from NYU to the Woolly Man without a Face, every name is a locked-room mystery, beguiling listeners and earning the band an exceptionally passionate and ever-growing cult fandom.
Quantum Criminals presents the world of Steely Dan as it has never been seen, much less heard. Artist Joan LeMay has crafted lively, color-saturated images of her favorite characters from the Daniverse to accompany writer Alex Pappademas’s explorations of the famous and obscure songs that inspired each painting, in short essays full of cultural context, wild speculation, inspired dot-connecting, and the occasional conspiracy theory. All of it is refracted through the perspectives of the characters themselves, making for a musical companion unlike any other. Funny, discerning, and visually stunning, Quantum Criminals is a singular celebration of Steely Dan’s musical cosmos.
The Quechua people, the "singing mountaineers" of Peru, still sing the songs that their Inca ancestors knew before the Spaniards invaded the Andes. Some of these songs, collected and translated into Spanish by José María Arguedas and María Lourdes Valladares from the Quechua language and the Huanca dialect, are now presented for the first time in English in the beautiful translations of Ruth Stephan, author of the recent prize-winning novel, The Flight. Also included in this rich collection are nine folk tales collected by Father Jorge A. Lira, translated into Spanish by Sr. Arguedas, and into English by Kate and Angel Flores.
The poems in Derek Henderson’s Songs are “translations” of a film cycle of the same name, shot by American filmmaker Stan Brakhage (1933–2003) to document his and his family’s life in Colorado in the mid-1960s. Where Brakhage’s films provide a subjective visual record of his experience bewildered by the eye, these poems let language bewilder the space a reader enters through the ear. Henderson tenders the visual experience of Brakhage’s films—films of the domestic and the wild, the private and political, the local and global—into language that insists on the ultimate incapacity of language—or of image—to fully document the comfort and the violence of intimacy. Songs expresses the ecstasy we so often experience in the company of family, but it just as urgently attests to ecstasy’s turbulent threat to family’s stability. Like Brakhage’s films, Henderson’s poems carry across into language and find family in every moment, even the broken ones, all of them abounding in hope.
Finalist for the 2023 Weatherford Fiction Award
Some called her the Everywhen Woman. She claimed to be 321 years of age. In 2038, after the big storm and the great flood and the bad times, Betty Baach wrote these words down and sometimes spoke them aloud, at her homeplace on Freon Hill. She referred to them as songs. All stories are songs, she’d always say.
Set in West Virginia, The Songs of Betty Baach is a magical guide to resisting despair and a compendium of wisdom and rhythms by which to fortify oneself. The lives of the Baaches of Keystone and the Knoxes of Mosestown twist and connect in a tale of survival and retribution that crosses three centuries—moving from Betty’s girlhood in colonial America to a future warped by environmental collapse and political unrest. Refusing the erasure of the lives of women, Indigenous peoples, and Black people who have always called this region home, this eloquent and distinctive novel is a necessary remedy for the continued distortion of a land and its inhabitants.
"Rowden has wedded ethnomusicology and disability studies to offer a fresh approach to the study of African American popular music. The Songs of Blind Folk undermines many of the defining mythologies and tropes of blind musicians, including the perception that they are successful because they compensate for the loss of vision."
---Mark Anthony Neal, Duke University
"Illuminates how the enduring phenomenon of blind African American musicians emerged from brutal conditions, how these musicians were deployed in the burgeoning American iconography of race and 'freakdom,' and how they negotiated this hazardous cultural terrain . . . the book is timely, well-historicized, and rich in insight."
---Kari Winter, University at Buffalo
The Songs of Blind Folk explores the ways that the lives and careers of blind and visually impaired African American musicians and singers have mirrored the changes in America's image of African Americans and the social positioning and possibilities of the entire black community. The book offers a historically grounded consideration of African American performers and their audiences, and the ways that blindness, like blackness, has affected the way the music has been produced and received. Author Terry Rowden considers the controversial nineteenth-century prodigy Blind Tom Bethune; blues singers and songwriters such as Blind Lemon Jefferson, who achieved an unprecedented degree of visibility and acceptance in the 1920s and '30s; spiritual and gospel musicians such as the Blind Boys of Alabama; celebrated jazz and rhythm and blues artists Art Tatum, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and Ray Charles; and finally, perhaps the best known of all blind performers, Stevie Wonder.
Terry Rowden is Assistant Professor of English at the City University of New York, Staten Island. He is coeditor of Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader.
Written over the course of seven years and in many locales in Latin America and Europe, the poems in Cantos de vida y esperanza reflect both Darío’s anguished sense of modern life and his ecstatic visions of transcendence, freedom, and the transformative power of art. They reveal Darío’s familiarity with Spanish, French, and English literature and the wide range of his concerns—existential, religious, erotic, and socio-political. Derusha and Acereda’s translation renders Darío’s themes with meticulous clarity and captures the structural and acoustic dimensions of the poet’s language in all its rhythmic sonority. Their introduction places this singular poet—arguably the greatest to emerge from Latin America in modern literature—and his best and most widely known work in historical and literary context. An extensive glossary offers additional information, explaining terms related to modernismo, Hispanic history, mythological allusions, and artists and writers prominent at the turn of the last century.
A First Peoples: New Directions in Indigenous Studies book
The Kuna Indians of Panama, probably best known for molas, their colorful appliqué blouses, also have a rich literary tradition of oral stories and performances. One of the largest indigenous groups in the South American tropics, the majority of them (about 70,000) reside in Kuna Yala, a string of island and mainland villages stretching along the Caribbean coast. It is here that Joel Sherzer lived among them, photographing and recording their verbal performances, which he feels are representative of the beauty, complexity, and diversity of the oral literary traditions of the indigenous peoples of Latin America.
This book is organized into three types of texts: humorous and moralistic stories; myths and magical chants; and women's songs. While quite different from one another, they share features characteristic of Kuna literature as a whole, including appreciation of their environment and a remarkable knowledge of their plants and animals; a belief in spirits as an important component of their world in curing, magic, and aesthetics; and, especially, great humor and a sense of play.
Vividly illustrated by a Kuna artist and accompanied by photographs that lend a sense of being present at the performances, the texts provide readers with a unique aesthetic perspective on this rich culture while preserving an endangered and valuable indigenous oral tradition.
First published in 1938, this lively collection of over 150 tales and songs runs the gamut from joy to woe, from horror to humor. In forming the collection, Charles Neely required only that the tales and songs—whether home grown or transplanted from the great body of world lore— had taken root somehow in the area of southern Illinois known as Egypt.
Notable tales include "Bones in the Well," "A Visit from Jesse James," "The Flight of the Naked Teamsters," "The Dug Hill Boger," and "How Death Came to Ireland"; among the songs and ballads are "Barbara Allen," "Hog and Hominy," "The Drunkard’s Lone Child," "The Belleville Convent Fire," "Shawneetown Flood," and "The Death of Charlie Burger."
Lydia R. Hamessley's expert analysis and Parton’s characteristically straightforward input inform this comprehensive look at the process, influences, and themes that have shaped the superstar's songwriting artistry. Hamessley reveals how Parton’s loving, hardscrabble childhood in the Smoky Mountains provided the musical language, rhythms, and memories of old-time music that resonate in so many of her songs. Hamessley further provides an understanding of how Parton combines her cultural and musical heritage with an artisan’s sense of craft and design to compose eloquent, painfully honest, and gripping songs about women's lives, poverty, heartbreak, inspiration, and love.
Filled with insights on hit songs and less familiar gems, Unlikely Angel covers the full arc of Dolly Parton's career and offers an unprecedented look at the creative force behind the image.
A grounded, tender, and mournful reckoning with the catastrophes that launched poor, white Anglos into their role as itinerant foot soldiers for modern imperialism—now in paperback with a new preface
Joanna Brooks’s ancestors were among the early waves of emigrants to leave England for North America. For generations, they lived hardscrabble lives, eking out subsistence in one place after another as they continually moved west in search of a better life. Why, Brooks wondered, did her people and countless other poor English subjects abandon their homeland for such unremitting hardship? The question leads her on a journey through an obscure dimension of American history.
Why We Left reveals the violence and dislocation that propelled seventeenth- and eighteenth-century working-class English emigration, presenting a powerful restorying of how we arrived at our present moment of precarity and rootlessness. Following American folk ballads back across the Atlantic to find histories of economic displacement, environmental destruction, and social betrayal at the heart of the early Anglo-American migrant experience, Brooks offers a scholarly and personal account of the intergenerational traumas that shape the history of white Anglos on Turtle Island.
She shares folk ballads such as “Edward,” which reveals the influence of deforestation on the dislocation of early Anglo-American peasant immigrants, and “The House Carpenter’s Wife,” which emphasizes the impact of economic instability and the colonial enterprise on women. From these ballads, tragic and heartrending, Brooks uncovers an archaeology of the worldviews of America’s earliest immigrants. This tenth-anniversary edition includes a new preface and develops a haunting historical perspective on the ancestors we thought we knew.
Across the state and across a wide variety of musical genres, women are making their mark on Texas music. Some have become international superstars, while others are just starting to make their voices heard. But every woman who goes out and plays her music proves that "baring one's heart and soul takes courage, and Texas women artists have a lot of courage," as Lloyd Maines observes in the opening interview of this book. To pay tribute to these dedicated musicians and to capture their unique perspectives on what it means to be a woman in the music business, Kathleen Hudson has spent many years interviewing Texas women musicians for the Texas Heritage Music Foundation.
In Women in Texas Music, Hudson lets us listen in on conversations with thirty-nine musical artists, including Emily Robison, Terri Hendrix, Lee Ann Womack, Rosie Flores, Betty Buckley, Marcia Ball, Lavelle White, and Bobbie Nelson. Hudson encourages and allows the women to tell their own stories as she delves into their life journeys, creative processes, and the importance of writing and performing music, be it blues, rock, country, folk, jazz, or pop. The interviews are warm and open, like good friends sharing the lessons that a life of playing music has taught them.
What emerges from this collection is a solid sense of the strength and integrity that women bring to and gain from Texas music. Everyone who cares about music and culture in Texas will want to join the conversation.
Size is usually the first thing that comes to mind when we ponder the great airships. In war and peace, to most people they seem bigger than life itself, bright, wondrous, sometimes dangerous apparitions that engender a religious awe. They remain the largest crafts that have ever been launched into the sky. Tracing the history of the airship from its beginning in the nineteenth century to its fiery conclusion in 1937, Robert Hedin has gathered the finest stories, descriptions, poems, music, and illustrations about what the era was like in fact and in spirit.
Included are vivid accounts by such legendary figures as Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, Hugo Eckener, and Alberto Santos-Dumont as well as memoirs, logs, journals, and diaries by Zeppelin commanders, crew, explorers, journalists, and survivors of ill-fated flights. The great airships inspired poets and writers old and new; here are works by such diverse writers as Robinson Jeffers, Kay Boyle, Bernard Shaw, D. H. Lawrence, Rita Dove, Richard Brautigan, and many others. There is a rich sampling of airship musical scores and lyrics; the music constitutes a kind of recovered history and helps recapture the emotional range of the era. Rounding out the gathering, The Zeppelin Reader is illustrated with stunning photographs, advertisements, drawings, and cartoons from the glorious age of airships.
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