Salzburg Studies in English Literature and Culture Sel & C – serie

Mozart in Anglophone Cultures brings together papers given at the 15th Salzburg Annual Conference on English Literature and Culture held in 2006 to commemorate Mozart’s 250th birthday. The volume concentrates in particular on the reception of Mozart and his work in English literature and film, on English translations and adaptations of Mozart’s operas and songs, on the performance history of Mozart’s operas on stages in the English-speaking world, and on relationships and influences between Mozart and English composers. Aspects covered in the volume include: Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus as historiographic metafiction, the reception of Mozart in Australia, Mozart’s works as intertext in James Joyce’s Ulysses and Barbara Trapido’s Temples of Delight, Mozart’s influence on American ballet and W. H. Auden’s re-writing of The Magic Flute. In its focus on the creative reception of Mozart rather than on Mozart’s oeuvre, this book hopes to show the importance of a living myth in various cultural traditions (Victorian, Modernist and Postmodernist) – and, conversely, to reveal Mozart and his own age’s mode of listening as being equally embedded in cultural traditions.

The human body is a recurrent theme in contemporary literatures in English. The aim of this collection of essays is to explore its multiple representations and functions within a wide range of texts drawn together from various Anglophone cultures. For thematic coherence, this volume is divided into four parts: Diseased Bodies, Invented Bodies, Gendered and Transgender Bodies, and Fragmented and Mutilated Bodies. By adopting multi-disciplinary perspectives, each group of essays illustrates the different ways in which these become multiply signifying sites of cultural and political representation, whether the mode is realistic or daringly speculative and fantastic, as in the case of genetically designed bodies, monstrous and machine bodies. This book contributes to understanding the body as a culture-specific construct.

This study applies Victor Turner’s theory of liminality to an examination of early British Gothic fiction and its cultural context. Contrary to the widespread belief that the Gothic is escapist in nature, a close reading of novels such as William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) or Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) reveals that they actively engage with socio-political and educational debates of the time. Using the licence of fantastic literature, the Gothic sets up social experiments in which young, inexperienced protagonists have to face a variety of institutions. Under what circumstances are they willing to submit to these social orders? Why are rites of passage often bound to fail? These are questions consistently raised in this genre and explored in this study with reference to a wide range of political, legal, and educational treatises of the eighteenth century.