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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Articulate Sounds: Music, Dissent, and Literary Culture, 1789-1840

Articulate Sounds: Music, Dissent, and Literary Culture, 1789-1840

Grande, James

Hardcover

Series: British Academy Monographs

Literary CriticismGeneral ChristianityMusic Reference

ISBN10: 1836245734
ISBN13: 9781836245735
Publisher: British Academy
Published: Jan 9 2026
Pages: 258
Weight: 1.19
Height: 0.63 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English

An open access version of this book is available.

Articulate Sounds uncovers the complex relationship between music, literature, and religious dissent in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. While collective song was central to Dissenting identities and culture, James Grande shows how many aspects of music were viewed with suspicion or even hostility by Nonconformist writers. Throughout the Romantic period, Dissenters debated questions of musical meaning and the connections between music and the written word, as well as the vaunted power of music over the emotions and changing ideas about listening, lyric, sound, and voice. Individual chapters focus on a range of canonical and less well-known authors, including Blake, Godwin, Iolo Morganwg, Amelia Opie, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb, and Hazlitt. This book follows their careers across Britain but is grounded in the 'world city' of Romantic London, revealing a history of cosmopolitan cultural exchange. Tracing the Dissenting response to a rich variety of musical forms, from opera to oratorio, and from the symphony to popular ballads and hymns, Articulate Sounds demonstrates how Dissenters' deep ambivalence towards music shaped the literary culture of Romanticism. The neglected history of music and Dissent offers a new understanding of both the evolution of Protestant Nonconformity and the contested place of music in nineteenth-century Britain.

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