Results by title

The official publication of the American Bach Society, Bach Perspectives pioneers new areas of research into the life, times, and music of the master composer. In Volume 10 of the series, Matthew Dirst edits a collection of groundbreaking essays exploring various aspects of Bach's organ-related activities. Lynn Edwards Butler reconsiders Bach's report on Johann Scheibe's organ at St. Paul's Church in Leipzig. Robin Leaver clarifies the likely provenance and purpose of a collection of chorale harmonizations copied in Dresden. George Stauffer investigates the ways various independent trio movements served Bach as an artist and teacher. In separate contributions, Christoph Wolff and Gregory Butler seek the origins of concerted Bach cantata movements spotlighting the organ and propose family trees of both parent works and offspring. Finally, Matthew Cron provides a broad cultural frame for such pieces and notes how their components engage in a larger discourse about the German Baroque organ's intimation of heaven.

In modern Japan, where the mechanisms of producing national consensus and social conformity operate with considerable force and efficacy, the democratic credentials of public life are a pressing question. Beginning with the Pacific War and extending through the early 1970s, this issue of positions explores a number of sites in Japan's postwar history where individuals and groups endeavored to reconfigure the social, cultural, and political dimensions of public space and public life. While the collection does not offer comprehensive coverage of all the manifestations of "public" in postwar Japan, it presents a series of "local" studies which, taken together, provide a suggestive map of the contours of the public in postwar Japan.

The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle offer a window onto the lives of two of the Victorian world’s most accomplished, perceptive, and unusual inhabitants. Scottish writer and historian Thomas Carlyle and his wife, Jane Welsh Carlyle, attracted to them a circle of foreign exiles, radicals, feminists, revolutionaries, and major and minor writers from across Europe and the United States. The collection is regarded as one of the finest and most comprehensive literary archives of the nineteenth century.

The sudden and premature death of Alan Bray deprived gay and lesbian studies of a founding figure. Best known for his 1982 book Homosexuality in Renaissance England, Bray paved the way for subsequent scholars in early modern gay and lesbian studies. This special issue of GLQ collects essays that draw on and expand Bray’s work of the past two decades, as well as offer new work in the emerging field of friendship studies, of which he was a pioneer.

Contributors to the collection include some of the most prominent scholars in the field of early modern sexualities. They think expansively about Bray’s impact on their own work and, most importantly, test the applicability of his theories (that same-sex desire has a history that can be reconstructed and that the actual object of study is difficult to capture, as its expression varies radically across cultures and societies) in areas where they have not been previously employed. Two essays in this collection explore friendships or intimacies between women or between men and women—topics Bray did not pursue extensively. Others deal with locations outside Bray’s heavily English focus, including France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, or apply his theories to periods beyond the Renaissance. Additionally, the issue includes a review of Bray’s The Friend, published posthumously, and an assessment of his scholarly career from his earliest writings to this final work.

Contributors. George Chauncey, Carla Freccero, Jonathan Goldberg, Jody Greene, George E. Haggerty, Jeffrey Masten, Jeffrey Merrick, Stephen Orgel, Laurie Shannon, Valerie Traub

This issue considers the sustainability of English studies and of the humanities as a whole in the context of shrinking budgets and job opportunities and of shifting resources. Exploring topics from academic freedom and globalization to digitization, diversity, and the value of a humanities-based education, “To Delight and Instruct” reexamines the work of the English professor and calls for a reassessment of the priorities and means that undergird it.

Contributors examine the faculty’s fundamental responsibilities to classroom teaching, the university, and the community. Attending to the relationship between changing technologies and literacy in a global environment, the issue not only argues for a reassertion and reimagining of the humanities in the contemporary university but, perhaps as important, helps articulate a way forward.

Contributors: Michael Bérubé, Martin Bickman, Marc Bousquet, Elizabeth Brockman, Sheila T. Cavanagh, Danielle Nicole DeVoss, Patricia Donahue, Gerald Graff, Donald E. Hall, Gail E. Hawisher, Jennifer L. Holberg, Colin Jager, Paul Lauter, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Julie Lindquist, Harriet Kramer Linkin, Mark C. Long, Donald G. Marshall, Richard E. Miller, James Phelan, Mariolina Rizzi Salvatori, Robert Scholes, Cynthia L. Selfe, Marcy Taylor