Examines the interaction between music and liberal discourses in Victorian Britain, revealing the close interdependence of political and aesthetic practices.

This volume reveals music's role in Victorian liberalism and its relationship with literature, locating the Victorian salon within intellectual and cultural history.

This is a critical assessment of Victorian cathedral music, unique in its detailed treatment of the cultural intellectual, philosophical and religious issues that shaped the composer's creative world and so influenced compositional practice. Among the issues investigated by William Gatens are the status of music in Church and society, the Victorians' views on the moral dimension of music, the aesthetic implications of Christian orthodoxy and notions of stylistic propriety. The careers and works of seven eminent composers - Thomas Attwood, T. A. Walmisley, John Goss, S. S. Wesley, F. A. G. Ouseley, John Stainer and Joseph Barnby - are discussed in some detail with emphasis on anthems and fully composed service settings. These provide specific illustrations of stylistic trends and the practical effects of theoretical principles. The study seeks to correct some of the misunderstandings and distortions that were common among earlier twentieth-century writers on the subject.

The art of appreciation -- "Audiences of the future" : the Robert Mayer Concerts for Children (1924-1939) -- Victorians on radio : Music and the Ordinary Listener (1926-1939) -- Music education on film : Instruments of the Orchestra (1946) -- Outside the ivory tower : extra-mural music at the University of Birmingham (1948-1964) -- The Avant-garde goes to school : O Magnum Mysterium (1960) -- Epilogue : the middlebrow in an age of cultural pluralism.

Between 1830 and 1886, Liberals dominated British politics. Focusing on the strategies of successive Liberal leaders, this study gives an overview of that dominance and argues that liberalism was a much more coherent force than has generally been recognized by historians.

In this intellectual history of American liberalism during the second half of the nineteenth century, Leslie Butler examines a group of nationally prominent and internationally oriented writers who sustained an American tradition of self-consciously progressive and cosmopolitan reform. She addresses how these men established a critical perspective on American racism, materialism, and jingoism in the decades between the 1850s and the 1890s while she recaptures their insistence on the ability of ordinary citizens to work toward their limitless potential as intelligent and moral human beings. At the core of Butler's study are the writers George William Curtis, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, James Russell Lowell, and Charles Eliot Norton, a quartet of friends who would together define the humane liberalism of America's late Victorian middle class. In creative engagement with such British intellectuals as John Stuart Mill, Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Leslie Stephen, John Ruskin, James Bryce, and Goldwin Smith, these "critical Americans" articulated political ideals and cultural standards to suit the burgeoning mass democracy the Civil War had created. This transatlantic framework informed their notions of educative citizenship, print-based democratic politics, critically informed cultural dissemination, and a temperate, deliberative foreign policy. Butler argues that a careful reexamination of these strands of late nineteenth-century liberalism can help enrich a revitalized liberal tradition at the outset of the twenty-first century.

In Liberal Epic, Edward Adams examines the liberal imagination’s centuries-long dependence on contradictory, and mutually constitutive, attitudes toward violent domination. Adams centers his ambitious analysis on a series of major epic poems, histories, and historical novels, including Dryden’s Aeneid, Pope’s Iliad, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Byron’s Don Juan, Scott’s Life of Napoleon, Napier’s History of the War in the Peninsula, Macaulay’s History of England, Hardy’s Dynasts, and Churchill’s military histories—works that rank among the most important publishing events of the past three centuries yet that have seldom received critical attention relative to their importance. In recovering these neglected works and gathering them together as part of a self-conscious literary tradition here defined as liberal epic, Adams provides an archaeology that sheds light on contemporary issues such as the relation of liberalism to war, the tactics for sanitizing heroism, and the appeal of violence to supposedly humane readers. Victorian Literature and Culture Series