In the period between the Second World War and the present, there has been an extraordinary rise in the production of medievalist fantasy literature and film. This has been accompanied by the revival, performance and invention of medieval music. In this enterprise modern fantasies of the Middle Ages have exercised great influence.
Fantasies of music in nostalgic medievalism shows how music, medievalism and nostalgia have been woven together in the fantasies of writers and readers, musicians, musicologists, directors and listeners, film-makers and film-goers. This book studies the ways in which three fields of creative activity inspired by the medieval – musical performance, literature, cinema and their reception – have worked together to produce and sustain, for some, the fantasy of a long-lost, long-mourned paradisal home.
Table of Content
Introduction: Music, nostalgia and the medieval
1 More real than reality: nostalgia for the medieval in high fantasy fiction
2 ‘Yearning for the sweet beckoning sound’: Musical longings and the unsayable in medievalist fantasy fiction
3 The lost world inside a song: from the book to the record
4 Exotic sexualities: the countertenor voice in the late twentieth-century medieval music revival
5 The call of the mother: music for myth and fantasy in two Arthurian films
Aftermath
About the author
Helen Dell is a research fellow at the University of Melbourne
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