Browsing by Author "Regier, Alexander"

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    A Practical Guide to Guglielmo Quarenghi's Six Caprices
    (2014-11-24) Yang, Clara; Lavenda, Richard; Fischer, Norman; Loewen, Peter; Regier, Alexander
    Nineteenth-century Italian cellist, Guglielmo Quarenghi (1826-1882), was a virtuoso performer, pedagogue, and composer active in Milan, Italy. Despite his successful career, Quarenghi’s accomplishments as a cellist, as well as his contribution to the cello repertoire, are practically unknown today. Quarenghi’s merits may not be readily apparent based on the rather scant biographical information available, but once his work is explored in detail, his brilliance and the status of his works as a valuable asset to cello playing is clearly evident. This paper explores Quarenghi’s life and a selection of his works, and offers an in-depth pedagogical guide to his Six Caprices. Composed in 1863, Quarenghi’s Caprices is one of the more obscure works of the cello repertory, but it has much to offer the contemporary cellist. This paper consists of four parts: (1) a summary of historical and musical contexts surrounding Quarenghi’s life, (2) a study of Quarenghi’s selected concert works, (3) an exploration of Quarenghi’s pedagogical approach as revealed through his method book, and (4) a practical guide to Quarenghi’s Six Caprices. With a goal of promoting and defining the value of Quarenghi’s Caprices, the following discussion of the Caprices offers musical analysis and editorial commentary, as well as preparatory exercises, performance suggestions, and excerpts from related standard repertoires for further study. The edited version of the Six Caprices is included in Appendix 2.
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    Formal Invitations: Techniques of Interpolation in Visual and Verbal Art, 1760-1880
    (2024-04-15) Cook, Nina Elisabeth; Michie, Helena; Regier, Alexander
    Formal Invitations: Techniques of Interpolation in Visual and Verbal Art, 1760-1880 argues that nineteenth-century literature and visual art share a common investment in audience immersion. Beginning from the hypothesis that various representational techniques in prose and painting (in function, if not form) mirror one another, this project identifies and deconstructs these techniques, grouping them by their functions of identification, recognition, collaboration, and immersion. The innovative formal techniques I identify¬¬– such as free indirect discourse and direct address in the novel, and the Rückenfigur and multiperspectivalism in painting–trouble the boundary between subject and object, audience and artwork. Juxtaposing novels such as Tristram Shandy, Emma, Jane Eyre, and Middlemarch with visual artifacts such as William Hogarth’s prints, John Constable’s six-footer landscapes, Pre-Raphaelite narrative paintings, and the panorama, my chapters probe the period’s formal devices and their peculiar capacity both to absorb the audience and invite interactivity. From the first chapter, which shows how free indirect discourse and the Rückenfigur device open a space for the audience to identify with characters, to the final chapter that explores how the panorama and Middlemarch spatially surround and rhetorically assimilate the audience, I ground the genesis of this desire for immersion in the Victorian era. The techniques of immersion I analyse were developed over a lengthy period, reaching, like the novel, a level of sophisticated self-referentiality and refined articulation during the core of the nineteenth century. This evolution continues beyond the nineteenth century, however, and in its broadest ambitions, my project sketches a genealogy of techniques of immersion that culminates in technologies such as interactive gaming and virtual reality.
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    Silence, Sentimentalism, and the British Romantic Novel, 1789–1824
    (2015-04-24) Saikin, Anna Dodson; Regier, Alexander; Joseph, Betty; Costello, Leo
    My dissertation argues that silence provides a lens through which we can trace the development of the Romantic novel from the eighteenth century novel. In the eighteenth century, anxieties about female selfhood and identity become linked to proper modes of communication that reveal class and/or gender differences that could threaten the social order they were meant to uphold. If performed correctly, it was thought, expressions of sympathy would contribute to the development of sociability by establishing a prescriptive narrative to teach readers how to respond to suffering bodies. The sentimental novel silences female experience and rewrites it into a teleology that can be used for an observer’s emotional and moral advancement. I argue that Romantic novelists including Ann Radcliffe, Walter Scott, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen adapt situations and themes from the sentimental novel to reframe silence as an empowering form of expression that mitigates social and historical anxieties about female selfhood and individuality. As representative authors of the gothic, historical, and domestic novels, Radcliffe, Scott, Burney, and Austen rework silence into a positive exploration of the social implications of sympathy. My dissertation advances a theory of the novel’s development that addresses the conflict between appropriate means of communication and women’s disappearance from the publishing marketplace by reframing silence not as a symptom of female vulnerability but a communication strategy that emerged as a way to overcome repressive market forces. Following an introduction that situates the popularity of the sentimental novel between the moral ethos set by Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748) and the critical uncertainty faced by women writers, my first chapter investigates settings in Radcliffe’s gothic novels where silence proliferates to show how her heroines overcome their inability to protest their suffering by escaping to sublime landscapes. My second chapter develops the gothic’s critique of sympathy as a social phenomenon through an investigation of visual scenes and moments of aphasia in Scott’s Bride of Lammermoor (1819). Building on Scott’s development of the historical novel, my third chapter examines the limitations of class-based sympathetic responses in Burney’s last novel, The Wanderer (1814), to show how the protagonist’s refusal to speak about her identity limits her mobility. My fourth chapter concludes my dissertation by examining the impact of Austen’s development of free indirect discourse on the novel’s ability to represent female interiority. Beginning with an investigation of conduct books that advocated reticence as the proper means for women to communicate, I argue that Austen’s development of free indirect discourse permits the reader to see through the artificiality of society’s mannerisms and conversation. When read as a group, these four novelists show the variety of means by which the Romantic novel recuperates silence as a positive form of female self-expression.
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    The Romantic Reinvention of Imperial China, 1759–1857
    (2016-04-21) Hargrave, Jennifer Lauren; Regier, Alexander
    "The Romantic Reinvention of Imperial China" argues that Romantic literature shaped nineteenth-century interimperial exchanges between Britain and China. This project bridges two bodies of literary scholarship immersed in Anglo-Sino discourse: eighteenth-century scholarship, which reveals British perceptions of China as the embodiment of political stability and economic prowess; and nineteenth-century scholarship, which situates China in a British imperial context following the first Opium War (1839–42). The minimal scholarship on Anglo-Sino relations between the Enlightenment and Victorian periods suggests a lull in these exchanges during the Romantic era. On the contrary, British interest in China increased exponentially following the first Anglo-Sino diplomatic exchange in 1793. Yet the popular demand for information about China exceeded British knowledge of the Qing Empire. China’s historical isolation had resulted in two substantial gaps in Western knowledge of the Middle Kingdom: the first between Marco Polo’s thirteenth-century travelogue and seventeenth-century Jesuit scholarship; and the second between the Kangxi Emperor’s 1721 ban on Christian missions and the end of the second Opium War in 1860. From the mid-eighteenth century up to the first Opium War—a period in which British imperialism escalated—Britons tackled these gaps in cultural knowledge with myriad visual and textual publications regarding China. These publications—broadly categorized as Sinology—included dramas, satires, travelogues, vernacular textbooks, poems, Chinese-English translations, cultural studies, and political essays. Through analyses of these archival and canonical materials, "Romantic Reinvention" establishes Sinology’s role in formulating nineteenth-century British imperial ideology. Romantic Sinological texts—often dismissed by scholars as ancillary to Britain’s contentious economic relationship with China—actually challenge narratives that depict nineteenth-century representations of foreign spaces as unequivocally imperialist. Romantic Sinologists often represented China as a self-sufficient, culturally sophisticated empire while simultaneously expressing an imperial desire for its subjugation. Their inconsistent depictions of China subverted popular imperialist attitudes, thereby problematizing modern linear accounts of British imperial history. Ironically, Romanticists’ tempered admiration for Chinese culture compelled their Victorian successors to develop new modes of representation that asserted China’s inferiority. "The Romantic Reinvention of Imperial China" demonstrates how Romanticism’s multifaceted literary representations of China unwittingly inaugurated the discourses that condoned British imperial expansion.