Books to look out for in April 2019

George Rochberg, American Composer

Personal Trauma and Artistic Creativity

The first comprehensive study devoted to tracing and putting into a rich cultural context the career of George Rochberg, widely acknowledged as one of the most prominent musical postmodernists. Based on private diaries, correspondence, and unpublished writings, George Rochberg, American Composer, reveals the impact of personal trauma on the creative and intellectual work of a leading postmodern composer.

Dressing the Scottish Court, 1543-1553

Clothing in the Accounts of the Lord High Treasurer of Scotland

The Accounts of the Lord High Treasurer of Scotland document money spent by the royal treasury and contain numerous references to clothing and textiles. This volume is designed to make the rich material in the Accounts from the regency of the Earl of Arran (whose ward was Mary Queen of Scots) available to those interested in the study of dress and accessories.

Experiments with Truth

Narrative Non-fiction and the Coming of Democracy in South Africa

Experiments with Truth is the first book-length account of non-fiction in South African literature. It reads the country’s transition as refracted through an array of documentary modes that are simultaneously refashioned and blurred into each other: long-form analytic journalism and reportage; experiments in oral history, microhistory and archival reconstruction; life-writing, memoir and the essay. It traces the strange and ethically complex process by which real people, places and events are shuffled, patterned and plotted in long-form prose narrative.

The Making of Victorian Bristol

Overshadowed by more economically vibrant towns of the industrial north, Bristol’s prospects in 1800 were far from certain. This book provides a detailed account of how Bristol was transformed by a growing population, industrial change, technological innovation and urban expansion over the course of the nineteenth century. The book offers a distinctive and original contribution not only to the historiography of Bristol, but also to the study of urbanisation in nineteenth-century Britain in general.

A Companion to the Works of Hermann Broch

Hermann Broch (1886-1951) is best known for his two major modernist works, The Sleepwalkers (3 vols., 1930-1932) and The Death of Virgil (1945), which frame a lifetime of ethical, cultural, political, and social thought. Broch wrote to better understand and shape the political and cultural conditions for a postfascist world. This volume covers the major literary works and constitutes the first comprehensive introduction in English to Broch’s political, cultural, aesthetic, and philosophical writings.

Explorations in Baltic Medical History, 1850-2015

The Baltic Sea region in northern Europe, with its history of multiple cultural and social transformations, as well as mixture of national and regional scientific styles, has lately attracted much attention from scholars of various disciplines. This book explores the history of medicine in the Baltic Sea region and provides different answers to one central question: How has the circulation of knowledge in the Baltic Sea region influenced medicine as a discipline, and illness as an experience, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries?

Celluloid Revolt

German Screen Cultures and the Long 1968

The epoch-making revolutionary period universally known in Germany as ’68 can be argued to have predated that year and to have extended well into the 1970s. It continues to affect German and Austrian society and culture to this day. Yet while scholars have written extensively about 1968 and the cinema of other countries, relatively little sustained scholarly attention has thus far been paid to 1968 and West German, East German, and Austrian cinemas. Now, five decades later, Celluloid Revolt sets out to redress that situation, generating new insights into what constituted German-language cinema around 1968 and beyond.

Herbert of Bosham

A Medieval Polymath

Herbert of Bosham (c.1120-c.1194) was one of the most brilliant, original and versatile thinkers of the twelfth century. Herbert was Thomas Becket’s closest confidant, a theologian, biblical commentator, historian, letter-writer and Hebrew scholar; he wrote a Life of St Thomas unlike any other contemporary biography, produced one of the most visually-arresting illuminated Bible books of his age, and composed a commentary on the Psalms inspired by Jewish scholarship. His uncompromising character, and the originality and complexity of his thought, meant that Herbert’s works were largely ignored during his lifetime and forgotten for centuries, but more recently they have begun to receive the attention and approval that their author insisted they deserved.

Maurice Duruflé

The Man and His Music

Maurice Duruflé: The Man and His Music is a new biography of the great French organist and composer (1902-86), and the most comprehensive in any language. James E. Frazier traces Duruflé’s musical training, his studies with Tournemire and Vierne, and his career as an organist, church musician, composer, recitalist, Conservatoire professor, and orchestral musician. Frazier also examines the career and contributions of Duruflé’s wife, the formidable organist Marie-Madeleine Duruflé-Chevalier.