The constant flow of people, ideas, and commodities across the Atlantic propelled the development of a public sphere and a transnational urban imaginary, influencing national and international cultural and political intersections and innovations. The contributors in Urban Identity and the Atlantic World explore the multiple ways in which a growing urban consciousness was integrated into the more cosmopolitan and transnational creation of an Atlantic public sphere. Wide-ranging, this volume brings together research using a variety of interdisciplinary approaches from social history to literary studies, and from indigenous studies and Africana studies to theatre history.

The Romantic period was characterized by a new historical self-consciousness in which history, and in particular the medieval, became an important screen for comprehending the present. Recent Scholarship has proposed contending theories for understanding how the historical is used to symbolize the political in the period. Romantic Medievalism takes an original position in proposing a critical difference in how the medieval was used to interpret the present, arguing that, where as the conservative writers identified with the knight of romance, radical writers identified with the troubadour of the courtly love lyric.

The constant flow of people, ideas, and commodities across the Atlantic propelled the development of a public sphere. Chapters explore the multiple ways in which a growing urban consciousness influenced national and international cultural and political intersections.

Elizabeth Fay's invaluable book addresses the reader in an immediate and direct manner to provide an unequaled introduction to the issues most important for feminist analyses of Romantic literature. In her opening chapter, Fay offers detailed definitions and a historicized grounding that gives a thorough account of feminist theory's involvement in Romantic studies and provides a rigorous methodology for students to follow, concluding with a highly instructive case study on Jane Austen. Subsequent chapters deal with women and revolutionary politics, the Gothic genre and domestic politics, women and thought, and women and identity, which covers visuality in Romantic texts. Further reading is listed at the end to each chapter. The book includes key illustrations and a comprehensive bibliography.

Writters discussed: Jane Austen, Joanna Baillie, Anna Laeriria Barbauld, Frances Burney, Elizabeth Carter, Hannah Cowley, Charlotte Dacre, Mary Hays, Felicia Hemans, Elizabeth Inchbald, Maria Jane Jewbury, Catherine Macaulay Graham, Elizabeth Montagu, hannah More, Ann Radcliffe, Clara Reeve, Mary Robinson, Sarah Scott, Anna Seward, Mary Shelley, Charlotte Smith, Jane Taylor, helen Maria Willaims, Maria Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth.

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) has a reputation as one of the leading composers of the twentieth century. But the story of his controversial role in history is still being told, and his full measure as a musician still being taken. This collection of essays goes far in expanding the traditional purview of Shostakovich's world, exploring the composer's creativity and art in terms of the expectations--historical, cultural, and political--that forged them.

The collection contains documents that appear for the first time in English. Letters that young "Miti" wrote to his mother offer a glimpse into his dreams and ambitions at the outset of his career. Shostakovich's answers to a 1927 questionnaire reveal much about his formative tastes in the arts and the way he experienced the creative process. His previously unknown letters to Stalin shed new light on Shostakovich's position within the Soviet artistic elite.

The essays delve into neglected aspects of Shostakovich's formidable legacy. Simon Morrison provides an in-depth examination of the choreography, costumes, decor, and music of his ballet "The Bolt" and Gerard McBurney of the musical references, parodies, and quotations in his operetta "Moscow, Cheryomushki." David Fanning looks at Shostakovich's activities as a pedagogue and the mark they left on his students' and his own music. Peter J. Schmelz explores the composer's late-period adoption of twelve-tone writing in the context of the distinctively "Soviet" practice of serialism. Other contributors include Caryl Emerson, Christopher H. Gibbs, Levon Hakobian, Leonid Maximenkov, and Rosa Sadykhova. In a provocative concluding essay, Leon Botstein reflects on the different ways listeners approach the music of Shostakovich."