Author : Kate Horgan
Release : 2012
Genre : Great Britain
Kind : eBook
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Book Synopsis Singing to the King by : Kate Horgan

Download or read book Singing to the King written by Kate Horgan. This book was released on 2012. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study analyses the importance of songs in British eighteenth-century culture with specific reference to their political meaning. Traditionally marginalized in accounts of the ballad and the role of the ballad in literary culture, the political song will be situated as a multivalent phenomenon. Using an interdisciplinary methodology, combining the perspectives of literary studies and cultural history and deploying a neoPlatonic framework which highlights the utilitarian power of songs, the argument is focused on four major case-studies, covering the period 1723-1795. Its organizing theme derives from the story of the rescue of King Richard the Lionheart from imprisonment by the singing of his minstrel Blondel, which emerges in eighteenthcentury ballad and music scholarship, and again in the context of the French Revolution. The thesis traces the various manifestations of this theme as a way of establishing the interconnections between topical songs, political songs, classical songs, hymns, psalms and ballads as way of illustrating the complexity of political song culture in this period.