Scripture and Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain

(Hardback)

Available Formats

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

This volume brings together new approaches to music history to reveal the interdependence of music and religion in nineteenth-century culture. As composers and performers drew inspiration from the Bible and new historical sciences called into question the historicity of Scripture, controversies raged over the performance, publication and censorship of old and new musical forms. From oratorio to opera, from parlour song to pantomime, and from hymn to broadside, nineteenth-century Britons continually encountered elements of the biblical past in song. Both elite and popular music came to play a significant role in the formation, regulation and contestation of religious and cultural identity and were used to address questions of class, nation and race, leading to the beginnings of ethnomusicology. This richly interdisciplinary volume brings together musicologists, historians, literary and art historians and theologians to reveal points of intersection between music, religion and cultural history.

Author Bio

James Grande is Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature at Kings College London, UK. He is author of the forthcoming monograph Articulate Sounds: Music, Dissent and Literary Culture, 1789-1840 and co-editor of the forthcoming Sound and Sense in Britain, 1770-1840. Brian Murray is Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at Kings College London, UK. He is co-editor of Travel Writing, Visual Culture and Form (2014), Commodities and Culture in the Colonial World (2017), and Chosen Peoples: The Bible, Race and Empire in the Long Nineteenth Century (2020).