Jody Blake demonstrates in this book that although the impact of African-American music and dance in France was constant from 1900 to 1930, it was not unchanging. This was due in part to the stylistic development and diversity of African-American music and dance, from the prewar cakewalk and ragtime to the postwar Charleston and jazz. Successive groups of modernists, beginning with the Matisse and Picasso circle in the 1900s and concluding with the Surrealists and Purists in the 1920s, constructed different versions of la musique and la danse negre. Manifested in creative and critical works, these responses to African-American music and dance reflected the modernists' varying artistic agendas and historical climates.

"A new novel from the author of Oleander Girl, a novel in stories, built around crucial moments in the lives of 3 generations of women in an Indian/Indian-American Family"--

The essays in this edited volume, written in English and French, tackle the intriguing problems of fear and safety by analysing their various meanings and manifestations in literature and other narrative media. The articles bring forth new, cross-cultural interpretations on fear and safety through examining what kinds of genre-specific means of world-making narratives use to express these two affectivities. The articles also show how important it is to study these themes in order to understand challenges in times of global threats, such as the climate crisis, and - to imagine a better future. The main themes of the book are approached from various theoretical perspectives as related to their literary and cultural representations. Recent trends in research, such as affect and risk theory, serve as the basis for the discussion. Many of the articles in the volume discuss apocalyptic and dystopian narratives that currently permeate the entire cultural landscape. Dystopian narratives do not only deal with future threats, such as totalitarianism, technocracy, or environmental disasters, but also suggest alternative ways of being and new hopes in the form of political resistance. The articles in the volume also draw from disciplines such as gender studies and trauma studies to examine the threats posed by collective fears and aggression on individuals' lives and propose ways of coping with fear. These themes are addressed also in articles analysing new adaptations of old myths that retell stories of the past.

Examines the way in which Sophocles' play "Oedipus Tyrannus" and its hero, Oedipus, King of Thebes, were probably received in their own time and place, and relates this to twentieth-century receptions and interpretations, including those of Sigmund Freud.

Erik Satie (1866-1925) came of age in the bohemian subculture of Montmartre, with its artists' cabarets and cafés-concerts. Yet apologists have all too often downplayed this background as potentially harmful to the reputation of a composer whom they regarded as the progenitor of modern French music. Whiting argues, on the contrary, that Satie's two decades in and around Montmartre decisively shaped his aesthetic priorities and compositional strategies. He gives the fullest account to date of Satie's professional activities as a popular musician, and of how he transferred the parodic techniques and musical idioms of cabaret entertainment to works for concert hall. From the esoteric Gymnopédies to the bizarre suites of the 1910s and avant-garde ballets of the 1920s (not to mention music journalism and playwriting), Satie's output may be daunting in its sheer diversity and heterodoxy; but his radical transvaluation of received artistic values makes far better sense once placed in the fascinating context of bohemian Montmartre.