Content area
Full Text
Angelic Airs, Subversive Songs: Music as Social Discourse in the Victorian Novel, by Alisa Clapp-Itnyre; pp. xxvii + 226. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002, $49.95.
Music, whether heard at church or public concerts, or through participating in amateur music-making within the home, played an integral role in people's lives in Victorian England. The nature of that role, however, was strenuously debated as the music industry became more commercialized, women actively sought professional music careers, and observers became increasingly aware of the lack of a British composer whose music stood alongside those of his continental counterparts. Participating in the British musical scene themselves, Victorian novelists commented on such issues by incorporating musical themes and characters in their fiction. These fictional portrayals have not gone unnoticed by literary and musicological scholars. Indeed, in the last two decades an interdisciplinary approach to the study of Victorian literature and music has emerged. Such studies have produced a more panoramic view of the musical scene in England and a richer understanding of plot and character in many Victorian novels. Alisa ClappTtnyre's Angelic Airs, Subversive Songs: Music as Social Discourse in the Victorian Novel adds to this growing corpus of scholarship.
In her introduction, Clapp-Itnyre outlines the state of research exploring the connections between Victorian music and literature, and the various ways in which her study contributes to and expands upon previous scholarship. She "positions music of the nineteenth century as a charged site of cultural struggle insofar as it was promoted as both a transcendent corrective to social ills and a subversive cause for these ills" (xvii). In the following six chapters she examines the moral responsibilities imposed upon...