Emma Sutton – författare

Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagnerism in the 1890s is an interdisciplinary study of the influence of the operas, writing, and personality of Richard Wagner (1813-1883) on the work of Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898). Examining Beardsley's drawings and prose of the 1890s the study considers the ways in which Wagner's works were appropriated by this seminal figure of the British decadent movement. Despite recent critical interest in Beardsley and the 'fin-de-siècle', and considerable research on Wagnerism, Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagernism in the 1890s is the first study in English to consider at length Wagner's presence in Beardsley's work. Beardsley combined allusions to the German composer with many of the touchstones of decadent art - the exotic, the morbid, the erotic, and the mannered. In exploring Beardsley's often iconoclastic versions - or perversions - of Wagner's work Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagernism in the 1890s aims to investigate the role of Wagnerism with 'fin-de-siècle' British culture, in particular the relations between Wagnerism and contemporary decadence.

This study is a groundbreaking investigation into the formative influence of music on Virginia Woolf’s writingIn this unique study Emma Sutton discusses all of Woolf’s novels as well as selected essays and short fiction, offering detailed commentaries on Woolf’s numerous allusions to classical repertoire and to composers including Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner. Sutton explores Woolf’s interest in the contested relationship between politics and music, placing her work in a matrix of ideas about music and national identity, class, anti-Semitism, pacifism, sexuality and gender. The study also considers the formal influence of music – from fugue to Romantic opera – on Woolf’s prose and narrative techniques. The analysis of music’s role in Woolf’s aesthetics and fiction is contextualized in accounts of her musical education, activities as a listener, and friendships with musicians; and the study outlines the relationship between her ‘musicalized’ work and that of contemporaries including Joyce, Lawrence, Forster, Mansfield and Eliot. Key Features:Analysis of music, national identity and war in The Voyage Out, Jacob’s Room and Mrs DallowayClose reading of Wagner’s influence on the plot and narrative techniques of The Voyage OutAnalysis of music and philo- and anti-Semitism in The YearsInnovative reading of the ‘fugal’ structure of Mrs Dalloway

This is the first book-length study of Forster’sposthumously-published novel. Nine essays focus exclusively on Maurice and its dynamic afterlives inliterature, film and new media during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.Begun in 1913 and revised over almost fifty years, Maurice became adefining text in Forster’s work and a canonical example of queer fiction. Yetthe critical tendency to read Maurice primarily as a ‘revelation’ ofForster’s homosexuality has obscured important biographical, political and aestheticcontexts for this novel. This collection places Maurice among early twentieth-centurydebates about politics, philosophy, religion, gender, Aestheticism and allegory.Essays explore how the novel interacts with literary predecessors andcontemporaries including John Bunyan, Oscar Wilde, Havelock Ellis and EdwardCarpenter, and how it was shaped by personal relationships such as Forster’sfriendship with Florence Barger. They close-read the textual variants ofForster’s manuscripts and examine the novel’s genesis and revisions. They considerthe volatility of its reception, analysing how it galvanizes subsequentgenerations of writers and artists including Christopher Isherwood, AlanHollinghurst, Damon Galgut, James Ivory and twenty-first-century onlinefanfiction writers. What emerges from the volume is the complexity of thenovel, as a text and as a cultural phenomenon.