... the game past its limitations, and towards something like death triumphant. The game, Harkness says, has a ‘fragmentary beauty’ which ‘enabled us to pretend that death could be a tender experience’. This chapter explores how this early folding of death into an intricately patterned game forms one...

...This chapter focuses on the relationship between sound and image through the work of William Blake, considering Blake as both a writer of songs and a mediator of the popular music culture of Romantic period London. Many of the Songs of Innocence and Experience (1789, 1794) draw...

...The introduction charts the increasing attention to literary form in recent decades and stresses the importance of readers’ experiences, including the experience of form, in understanding literature’s impact on the world. The role of singularity and inventiveness in those experiences is discussed...

... drama, and encouraged in Zelter’s case by abundant performance directions. Schubert constructs intricately dynamic interchanges among words, keyboard, and vocalist. The key to the earlier songs is ‘soul’; that to Schubert is ‘experience’, as understood by Hegel. The Hegelian mode has overshadowed...

...This chapter traces the shifting nature of the representation of music throughout Hardy’s career as a novelist and short story writer. Musical experience in itself and as a trope was always of compelling significance for Hardy as a writer and a person. From his earliest fiction he associated...

... of experience without a subject. The chapter presents a set of examples from the work produced by the Topological Media Lab and the Synthesis Centre at Arizona State University in order to offer a definition of rhythm ‘without a subject’. Rhythm requires variation of matter – in a perfectly homogeneous...

...This chapter takes a look at how The Voyage Out developed out of Woolf's reading experiences. One notable experience considered is her exploration of what it meant to read as a woman. The chapter describes The Voyage Out as a courtship novel that has some...

... categorically decentre individual human experience, and finally looks at Mitchell's representation of globalisation. Barnes Julian Huxley Aldous Ishiguro Kazuo James Ian Mitchell David Nancy Jean Luc Orwell George Woolf Virginia compositeness connectivity Hutchens B C postmodernism singularity...

...It is easy to conclude that Immanuel Kant's account of aesthetic judgement underestimates the extent to which the disharmonious plays a role in our experience. In twentieth-century contemporary art, it would be fair to say that the disharmonious holds priority over the harmonious. This raises...

..., the historical experience of Muslim societies of pluralism is considered and examined. Overall, the classical Muslim historical experience presents sets of precedents of plurality and pluralism which would not be recognizable to modern notions of pluralism, or which would provide “sources of inspiration...

...This chapter tests the development of contemporary theories of the nation and of national identity — such as Benedict Anderson's concept of ‘imagined communities’ — against Scottish experience. It attempts to tend forgotten elements of Scotland's cultural past, and to do so...

...This chapter views The Lone Ranger (2013) as being on one level an attempt simply to provide the audience with a thrilling escapist experience. To this extent the film can be seen as a theme park ride that allows for an intense bodily experience subjecting the spectator’s senses...

... and reification of trauma. The book offers a revision of trauma theory that presents trauma not simply as a definitive experience and implicitly negative, but an experience that can foster a sense of hope and optimism for the future....

... brain breaks apart and thus literally kills off representation. It is in staging such acute moments of representational crisis that the narrative reaches the impersonal and nonhuman beyond of personal and human experience. By the same token the beyond of actual narratives is attained...

...This chapter examines ghostly gestures that we cannot consciously experience, but only perceive through digital technologies. Internationally recognized as a leading video artist, Viola’s work focuses on the intersections of new media and experiences like death, consciousness, spirituality...

... into being) and Kant (in which the individual participates in the creation of aesthetic experience). It suggests that Pater adapts Kant's transcendental self to account for creativity and aesthetic experience. Balliol College Oxford Carlyle Thomas ‘Diaphaneitè’ Pater idealism imagination individualism...

... Pippin, and other writers and artists of his generation and experience, who provided first-hand aesthetic reflections of the terrible nature of modern warfare, which were often written out of this most significant of modern events — one frequently configured as a white European tragedy. Grappling...

..., and is connected to the culture of advertisement and market operations. The chapter shows fashion and clothes as important in the subtle analyses of the relations between the individual and the structures of experience that are defined by the culture of the commodity. Bloomsbury consciousness Lewis P Wyndham...

...This chapter considers how we experience as well as draw meaning from music and poetry. Far from arguing about the true value of a poem or a piece of music, the chapter instead emphasises a smaller and more ‘intimate’ way of experiencing artforms. The point is simply that whatever...

...This book explores the philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer in relation to the movement of understanding and the question of aesthetic attentiveness. While hermeneutics is traditionally concerned with the apprehension of meaning and aesthetics, and focuses on the particularities of sensual experience...