Table of Contents

Introduction; Part I. Vocality, Textuality, and the Silencing of the Female Voice: 1. The Gorgon and the nightingale: the voice of female lament and Pindar's Twelfth Pythian Ode; 2. Music and the maternal voice in Purgatorio XIX; 3. Ophelia's songs in Hamlet: music, madness and the feminine; 4. Wordsworth and Romantic voice: the poet's song and the prostitute's cry; Part II. Anxieties of Audition: 5. 'No women are indeed': the boy actor as vocal seductress in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century drama; 6. Deriding the voice of Jeanette MacDonald: notes on psychoanalysis and the American film musical; 7. Adorno and the Sirens: tele-phono-graphic bodies; Part III. Women Artists: Vocality and Cultural Authority: 8. The diva doesn't die: George Eliot's Armgart; 9. Rewriting Ophelia: fluidity, madness, and the voice in Louise Colet's La Servante; 10. Staring the camera down: direct address and women's voices; 11. The voice of lament: female vocality and performative efficacy in the Finnish-Karelian itkuvirsi; Part IV. Maternal Voices: 12. The lyrical dimensions of spirituality: music, voice, and language in the novels of Toni Morrison; 13. Red hot mamas: Bessie Smith, Sophie Tucker, and the ethnic maternal voice in American popular song; 14. Maternalism and the material girl Nancy J. Vickers.

Promotional Information

Explores cultural manifestations of female vocality in the light of theories of subjectivity, the body, and sexual difference.

Reviews

'… a stimulating book which keeps its focus true despite the almost perverse range of subject matter ... [a] dizzying intellectual switchback.' The Musical Times

'... this book makes a bold step in addressing, not least, the future of musicological discourse; namely, whether and how to (dis)locate the boundaries between the musical and the 'extra-musical'. Thus, it should excite anyone interested in the fundamental issue of the meaning of music in our culture.' Brio