Fantasies of Music in Nostalgic Medievalism
By (Author) Helen Dell
Manchester University Press
Manchester University Press
30th January 2024
United Kingdom
General
Non Fiction
Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000
Art music, orchestral and formal music
Fantasy
Hardback
264
Width 138mm, Height 216mm, Spine 16mm
450g
In the period between the Second World War and the present, there has been an extraordinary rise in the production of medievalist fantasy literature and film. This has been accompanied by the revival, performance and invention of medieval music. In this enterprise modern fantasies of the Middle Ages have exercised great influence.
Fantasies of music in nostalgic medievalism shows how music, medievalism and nostalgia have been woven together in the fantasies of writers and readers, musicians, musicologists, directors and listeners, film-makers and film-goers. This book studies the ways in which three fields of creative activity inspired by the medieval musical performance, literature, cinema and their reception have worked together to produce and sustain, for some, the fantasy of a long-lost, long-mourned paradisal home.
Helen Dell is a research fellow at the University of Melbourne