This book provides insight into how musical performances contributed to emerging ideas about class and national identity. Offering a fresh reading of bestselling fictional works, drawing upon crowd theory, climate theory, ethnology, science, music reviews and books by musicians to demonstrate how these discourses were mutually constitutive.

'[ The Musical Crowd in English Fiction, 1840-1910 ] joins recent critical work... in moving the study of music and Victorian literature to new and provocative areas and will be of great interest to those who work in Victorian cultural studies and musicology.' - Laura Vorachek, Victorian Studies

Autorentext
PHYLLIS WELIVER is an Assistant Professor of English at Saint Louis University, USA. She is the author of Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1860-1900: Representations of Music, Science and Gender in the Leisured Home (2000) and editor of The Figure of Music in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry (2005).

Inhalt
Acknowledgements Introduction Surveillance and Musical Passion in Villette Germanic Music Ideals in Uptopian Communities: Charles Auchester, Erewhon and "Euphonia" Music, Climate Theory and the Working Classes in Sandra Belloni Imagining 1848 Risorgimento Opera Production in Vittoria Shaw's Fiction and the Emerging English Musical Renaissance From Collective Action to Creative Individuality: Robert Elsmere, Dodo, Althea and Howards End Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index