This wide-ranging volume of essays provides an illuminating set of approaches to the multifaceted contexts of Proust's life and work.

In Proust’s Songbook, Jennifer Rushworth analyzes and theorizes the presence and role of songs in Marcel Proust’s novel À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). Instead of focusing on instrumental music and large-scale forms such as symphonies and opera, as is common in Proust musical studies, Rushworth argues for the centrality of songs and lyrics in Proust’s opus. Her work analyzes the ways in which the author inserted songs at key turning points in his novel and how he drew inspiration from contemporary composers and theorists of song. Rushworth presents detailed readings of five moments of song in À la recherche du temps perdu, highlighting the songs’ significance by paying close attention to their lyrics, music, composers, and histories. Rushworth interprets these episodes through theoretical reflections on song and voice, drawing particularly from the works of Reynaldo Hahn and Roland Barthes. She argues that songs in Proust’s novel are connected and resonate with one another across the different volumes yet also shows how song for Proust is a solo, amateur, and intimate affair. In addition, she points to Proust’s juxtapositions of songs with meditations on the notion of “mauvaise musique” (bad music) to demonstrate the existence of a blurred boundary between songs that are popular and songs that are art. According to Rushworth, a song for Proust has a special relation to repetition and memory due to its typical brevity and that song itself becomes a mode of resistance in À la Recherche—especially on the part of characters in the face of family and familial expectations. She also defines the songs in Proust’s novel as songs of farewell—noting that to sing farewell is a means to resist the very parting that is being expressed—and demonstrates how songs, in formal terms, resist the forward impetus of narrative.

This collection of essays sets out to challenge the dominant narrative about Victorian theatre by placing the practices and products of the Victorian theatre in relation to Victorian visual culture, through the lens of the concept of 'Ruskinian theatre', an approach to theatre which values its educative purpose as well as its aesthetic expression.

Offers new perspectives on Proust's complex and creative relation to a variety of art forms from different eras.

Transfiguration explores the work of John Ruskin, Robert Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Walter Pater, treating in particular the ways in which they engaged with the Christian content of their subject, and, in Pater's case, how the art of Christianity was contrasted with classical sculpture. Stephen Cheeke examines two related phenomena: idolatry (a false substitution, a sexual betrayal), and the poetics of transfiguration (to elevate or glorify subject matter not thought of as conventionally poetic, to praise). Central to the book is the question of the "translation" of religion into art and aesthetics, a process which supposedly undergirds the advent of the museum age and makes possible the idea of a 'religion of art' as a phenomenon of late century Aestheticism. Such a phenomenon is prepared for, however, through the engagement with Christian painting and classical sculpture in the work of these four writers. All four thought carefully about the ways in which a particular mimetic impulse of 'making-live' in artworks could be connected to religious experience. This meant exploring the nature of the link between seeing and believing--visualising in order to conceive, to verify, but also in the sense of being acted upon by the visible. All four wrote about the great power of artworks to transfigure the objects of their attention. In each case, there emerges the possibility of a secret sexual knowledge hiding within, or lying on the other side of the sensuous knowledge of aesthesis. All four wondered whether this was inherently hostile to Christianity, or whether it may, finally, be an accommodation within it.

Draws together leading experts from a wide range of disciplines to analyse the life and work of John Ruskin (1819-1900).