Author Archives
Dr Michael Craske is a lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London. He researches transgressive poetics, music, aesthetics, and perhaps transgressive anything (but mainly Swinburne, Wagner, and T. S. Eliot). He was once involved in diplomacy, of a Middle Eastern kind...
-
“Let us adore spilled blood”
The Routledge Handbook of Victorian Scandals in Literature and Culture contains thirty essays exploring some of the Victorian era’s greatest moral infractions, titillations, and transgressions. Published earlier this year and edited by Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier, it contains… Read More ›
-
Volupté: Vernon Lee, Richard Wagner, and Dame Edna Everage
My article on Vernon Lee (1856-1935) has been published in Volupté: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies. Provocatively entitled ‘Lying Down or Standing Up for Music’, it examines ideas about ‘hearing’ and ‘listening’ in Lee’s final work, Music and its… Read More ›
-
‘Wild with petulance and impatience’: Swinburne, Gosse, and music.
My essay on Edmund Gosse’s malign influence on Swinburne studies, both biographical and critical, is available in the latest issue of the International Walter Pater Society’s journal. ‘“A Genius for Inaccuracy”: Edmund Gosse and the Case of Swinburne’s Missing Musical… Read More ›
-
Throwing a punch for Wagner: Revolution, gender, and the soundtrack of Decadence
-
Lot 228: A bookish harmony in black and gold
One of Swinburne’s bookcases, designed and painted by the artist James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) is up for sale at the Lyon & Turnbull auction house next week (21 April 2021). Shown in the auction house’s picture left, the bookcase stood… Read More ›
-
‘A Match’: Swinburne in Paris, Richard Monckton Milnes, “William Blake”, and Wagner’s “Tannhäuser”
The first two stanzas of A Match by Jeremiah Rhodes, published in 1868. Swinburne’s poem ‘A Match’ from his 1866 collection Poems and Ballads would become one of his most popular lyrics and the poem most often set to music…. Read More ›
-
A Swinburne song catalogue, a work in progress, and two Holy Grails
Here is a catalogue of songs which were set to the lyrics of Swinburne and published between 1866-1920. It also lists a few important unpublished songs and some musical oddities and odds and ends that I’m not sure how to… Read More ›
-
Chewing Swinburne’s Thistles: Swinburne, Dannreuther, and Wagner’s ‘Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg’
I’m glad to say that my short article on Edward Dannreuther (1844-1905) and Swinburne has been published in Notes & Queries. It reveals two hitherto unnoticed references to Wagner by Swinburne in his 1869 essay, ‘Notes on the Text of… Read More ›
-
‘The world, what is it to you, dear’: Mary Wakefield’s Maytime in Midwinter (1885)
On the afternoon of 13 March 1878 at a charity concert at the Palazzo Odescalchi in Rome, Mary Wakefield started to sing. In the audience was Anne Crawford, the Baroness von Rabe, who was amazed by her performance. It had… Read More ›