Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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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
Inventing Percy Grainger: The Construction of Biography on Page, Stage and Screen

Inventing Percy Grainger: The Construction of Biography on Page, Stage and Screen

Kirby, Sarah

Hardcover

MusiciansFilm StudiesMusic Reference

ISBN10: 183765221X
ISBN13: 9781837652211
Publisher: Boydell Press
Published: Feb 24 2026
Pages: 272
Weight: 1.23
Height: 0.63 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English
Investigates the dialogue and tensions between Percy Grainger's public biography and his self-conscious autobiographical construction via his own writings and autobiographical museum.

The Australian-American composer Percy Grainger (1882-1961) described himself as an 'all round man': composer, pianist, artist, inventor, linguist, ethnographer, essayist, and more. He also went to great lengths to shape his own biographical narrative, developing an eccentric public persona in the press, writing extensive autobiographical texts and establishing a vast autobiographical museum. But what happens when this self-fashioned narrative meets writers, scholars, and creatives in the decades since his death? This book traces the construction and negotiation of Grainger's biography on page, stage and screen through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, exploring the tensions and dialogue between these and Grainger's autobiographical self.

Through a series of case studies, with a focus on works created in Australia, the book explores how Grainger's public persona and received biographical narrative were developed then transformed by other writers, playwrights, filmmakers, and performance artists to suit the changing needs of their own time and place. Examining a variety of texts, from celebrity profiles, obituaries, and traditional academic studies, to film, theatre, opera and poetry, the book offers a biography of an afterlife: a study of how Grainger set up a series of mechanisms to control how his life would be remembered, then tests these against a succession of works that engage directly with those sources.

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