Dis Embodying Myths In Ancien R Gime Opera

Will appeal to all music, literature, and art lovers seeking to deepen their knowledge of an increasingly popular repertoire.

"This book investigates the stories behind the neglect and suppression of Antonín Dvorak's operas and presents new analysis and understanding of these beautiful works"--

This book explores why Renaissance epic poetry clung to fictions of song and oral performance in an age of growing literacy. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poets, Anthony Welch argues, came to view their written art as newly distinct from the oral cultures of their ancestors. Welch shows how the period’s writers imagined lost civilizations built on speech and song—from Homeric Greece and Celtic Britain to the Americas—and struggled to reconcile this oral inheritance with an early modern culture of the book. Welch’s wide-ranging study offers a new perspective on Renaissance Europe’s epic literature and its troubled relationship with antiquity.