Entering into Anton Webern’s twelve-tone music and its complex reception history is like entering into a combat with the Hydra: cleave off one head of the Webern myth, and two more grow in its place. Taking a step back from the embattled scenes of the past in search of a broader vantage point, this chapter argues that the crux in understanding late Webern lies in understanding that the competing, often contradictory images of the composer that have emerged pose no real contradictions after all. Instead, in the same way that the Hydra’s separate heads are essentially connected entities, these different images are best understood as mediated with one another on a deeper level, representing different aspects of one and the same aesthetic concern: musical lyricism.

This chapter focuses on one major change in African American poetry of the 1980s: the propping open of doors to predominantly white cultural institutions for (certain) African American poets. The author refers to three overlapping sites of power: (historically white) academic institutions that train critics and poets, which began embracing more Black students and faculty; publishing venues that selectively promoted certain Black poets, which include presses operated by white universities; and white-run awards-granting bodies, which started to honor a few more Black poets. All shifted their approaches to Black poetry throughout the 1980s – both helping and hindering Black poets.

The opening chapter sets out the terminological and conceptual ideas that provide a basis for the remainder of the book. Problematising the topic of musical subjectivity, it explicates the various meanings that have been given to this awkward notion and through increasing clarification proposes a range of potential meanings. Subjectivity here appears to refer to the experience of music as akin to a living being, an animate consciousness, but such that the experience may be of an apparent immediacy that shades it into a privileged first-person perspective. The second part of the chapter looks in turn to how subjectivity manifests itself both in music and in history, interrogating the notion of the musical subject through a series of questions that may be summarised as who, how and where, when and why? One of the properties of the idea of subjectivity identified here is that it is not a pre-given entity but a dynamic process that requires our own active participation for its interpretation. And thus while a number of conceptual questions still remain to be answered at the close of this chapter, it is given to the main body of the book to respond to these matters.

This chapter argues that Lamartine’s role in 1848 is best understood with reference not to his shallow and hastily written History of 1848 but to his earlier History of the Girondins. Lamartine’s goal was the creation of a moderate republic. His History of the Girondins was not a celebration but a critique of the Girondins whom he saw as revolutionary rhetoricians for whom politics was a matter of public gesture and private intrigue. By contrast with the Girondins’ failures, Lamartine indicated the steps to be taken by the leader of a future moderate revolution. What is remarkable is that for three months Lamartine did play the role for which he had prepared himself. His apotheosis came on April 23 when he received 1.3 million votes in the elections for the National Assembly. But he failed to understand that he owed his success to the fears of conservatives who regarded him as a restraining influence on radicals. These fears were greatly reduced by the overall conservative victory. After April 23 conservatives no longer needed Lamartine, whose fall was as rapid as his rise had been. While he tried to present himself as a conservative in his History of 1848, he was attacked by the right as “the man who taught revolution to France.”

This chapter examines Coetzee’s creative and scholarly engagements with literary style, beginning with his earliest novel Dusklands and moving across his corpus to track his complexly evolving use of style’s emotional, ethical, and political affordances. Apparently distinct, even diverging impulses – one embracing grace and euphony, the other committing to verbal thrift and minimalism – coalesce across Coetzee’s career, soliciting complicated affective responses from his readers to the inflections and connotations of novelistic discourse. It is critically tempting see Coetzee as a kind of stern gatekeeper of formal restraint: a writer who shuns the consolations of style and who forestalls the pleasures his readers might take in elegantly wrought language, by investing instead in a kind of syntactic austerity and bareness. In practice, however, his fiction doesn’t always behave in this manner, as beautifully paced, rhetorically supple sequences from Age of Iron, Disgrace, and The Schooldays of Jesus attest.