In contrast to narrative, description is a much less researched phenomenon, and where it so far has found attention at all, scholars have almost always discussed it with fiction in mind. The all but exclusive concentration on literature has hitherto obscured the fact that description transcends literature and indeed the verbal media in general and is not only a transgeneric but also a transmedial phenomenon that can be found in many other media and arts. This book is a pioneering interdisciplinary study of description since it for the first time undertakes to close this research lacuna by...

This volume contains a selection of nine essays with an interdisciplinary perspective. They were originally presented at the Sixth International Conference on Word and Music Studies, which was held at Edinburgh University in June 2007 and was organized by the International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA). The contributions to this volume focus on self-reference in various systematic, historical and intermedial ways. Self-reference - including, as a special case, metareference (the self-conscious reflection on music, literature and other medial concerns) - is explored, among...

The main section of this volume of essays addresses the topic of 'Performativity in Literature and Music', a subject of high contemporary relevance since a substantial part of recent reflections in the humanities are concerned with the performance aspect of cultural activities, particularly in the arts. This decisive reorientation of scholarly interests in the arts, trendily called the 'performative turn', has yielded significant contributions to an increasingly refined understanding of artistic processes from an up-to-date perspective, and specifically what has been called the 'crisis of the...

Readers who appear to be lost in a storyworld, members of theatre or cinema audiences who are moved to tears while watching a performance, beholders of paintings who are absorbed by the representations in front of them, players of computer games entranced by the fictional worlds in which they interactively participate - all of these mental states of imaginative immersion are variants of 'aesthetic illusion', as long as the recipients, although thus immersed, are still residually aware that they are experiencing not real life but life-like representations created by artefacts. Aesthetic...

The essays collected here raise a simple but rarely asked question: just what, exactly, is voice? From this founding question, many others proliferate: Is voice an animal category, as Aristotle thought? Or is it distinctively human? Is it essentially related to language? To music? To song and singing? Is it a mark of presence or of absence? Is it a kind of object? How is our sense of voice affected by the development of recording technology? The authors in this volume approach such questions primarily by turning away from a general idea of voice and instead investigating what can be learned...