Bakhtin's reception was unusual, because he was unknown outside a small circle of Soviet scholars until the 1960s. This chapter describes his belated rehabilitation and recognition as a scholar. In the English-speaking world, he was initially understood as part of Russian Formalism, but after the publication of his essays on the novel in 1981, he became a theoretical icon and master thinker. Enthusiasm for Bakhtin was widespread, suspiciously so, as he was embraced by widely divergent schools and trends in the literary critical world. His status as a theortical 'cure' or alternative to post-structuralism is discussed, as is the interesting appropriation of his work by feminist and postcolonial criticism.

Music, for too long, has been omitted in evaluations of Elizabeth Bishop – who studied piano and counterpoint for years and contemplated becoming a composer; who crossed continents with a clavichord, collecting instruments, scores, and records; and who cherished music as a profound analogue for poetry and its closest cousin among the arts. While generations of critics have given us frames for understanding Bishop as a visualist, this chapter shifts focus from her seeing to her hearing and enumerates five distinguishing characteristics of music as it appears in her work: manipulation of time, markings of place, involvement of both nature and culture, emotionally driven fantasy, and thisworldly sources. Following Bishop’s listening chronologically, as she encounters the European classical tradition, African American and Caribbean popular musics, and Brazilian folk music and samba, this chapter argues that Bishop fruitfully counterpointed music with her shifting sense of lyric poetry: sometimes music and lyrics bordered lyric; sometimes song was lyric’s unachievable opposite.

Dante’s divine vision is, in principle, impossible. The transcendent divinity, strictly speaking, is not to be seen. Only the mediation of Scripture enables humans to have some inkling of the divine. Yet Dante’s presentation of Scripture in the Heaven of Jupiter insists on the immediacy of its appearing before him as a vivid, animated spectacle of sound and light, son et lumière, a sort of fireworks in the firmament. The immediacy of writing as a visible medium is highlighted to such an extent and with such intensity that writing no longer serves simply as a medium but shows up, instead, as a concrete realization of divine presence. The immediacy of writing as a medium becomes a metaphor for divine immediacy. This exaltation of the letter invites comparison with the visions of the Jewish Kabbalah. It is further analyzed in light of Christian theologies of revelation by the incarnate Word and in Scripture, with attention to the materiality of the written medium of the letter. This vision is further focused theoretically through the lenses of media studies and of multi-media spectacles in popular and visual culture.

This chapter examines Gothic traditions in East Asian cinema, with a specific focus on films and popular culture from Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong. The chapter explores key features of the East Asian Gothic mode: generic hybridity, mythology, morality and important historical moments in the Western reception of influential films. The central argument uniting the analysis of these three distinct national cinemas concerns the narrative and thematic meaning of the figure of the ghost. How are local audiences expected and invited to respond to these avatars of the deceased? What do they reflect from contemporary society, and how do they comment on the past? The ghost in many of these films is not only an object of fear (indeed, it is frequently not an object of fear at all), but also, with varying frequency, a lover, or a hero or a subject of profound pity and sadness. The evolving meaning of the ghost in films from Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong suggests some ways that definitions and understandings of the Gothic should be reconfigured for a global media context.

“Popular Culture and Politics” seek to understand the influential force of popular culture, which can be optimized and utilized to transform the country’s sociopolitical future. As a social institution that arose from the forces of colonization, popular culture has a specific social role to play in that process. Characterized with an elastic capacity to instigate social ideas, popular culture in Nigeria can be used to bring about transformational changes and revolutionary thinking that can shape the Nigerian environment. Although the general belief is that popular culture serves as entertainment with no significant social benefits, that is not entirely the case. This study reveals the existing interconnection between politics and popular culture, highlighting the significance and the different approaches that can actively target a better Nigerian future through popular culture. Nigerian popular culture can use its transformational capacity to inspire desirable changes in the country’s political trajectory. It can be seen beyond its traditional role of entertainment, where it currently receives minimal national recognition. When the people who create cultural materials understand the power that they wield as a social institution, and when they use that power objectively, they can enact a revolution without violence.

Chapter 8 turns to the girl groups of the 1960s. Although often not taken seriously, they were one of the most successful musical phenomena of the first half of the 1960s in the United States. Jacqueline Warwick skilfully unpacks ‘girl culture’, the intersection of the girl groups with the contemporaneous civil rights movement, and key figures and groups of the era, such as the Shirelles, the Ronettes, the Shangri-Las, and the Supremes.

This chapter explores singers’ repertoires, from whence they were derived, and their networks of dissemination, and centres on my formulation of a cultural ‘mainstream’ of songs. I begin by placing the notoriously mixed repertoires available to us within a theoretical framework of the miscellaneous as a form of cultural consumption, before moving beyond specific lists of songs to a consideration of historical process. I examine the remarkable ways in which singers appropriated tunes from other cultural spaces, and the varying methods by which a lyric might be sourced. I look at the question of circulation both within and without London, and the movement of songs between different physical and social sites, demonstrating in particular the overwhelming musical importance of the theatre to mainstream song culture. I construct an image of this ‘mainstream’ as a working model for understanding how songs were produced, performed, and consumed in an age before sound recording: a model that necessarily takes issue with Peter Burke’s influential theory of the separation of elite and popular cultures by 1800. As the century progressed and harmonic forms of songwriting, informed by keyboards, came to prominence, this cultural model was no longer tenable, and newly-literate workers with a slightly improved disposable income began to consume songs in both physical and performative forms that bypassed the ballad-singer.

Developing the thesis elaborated in the latter part of Chapter 4, I contend that the demise of the ballad-singer was primarily due to a shift in mainstream taste and musical potential, as the masses developed both the appetite for, and access to, a wide range of more sophisticated music. By 1864, when this book ends, the ballad-singer was almost entirely absent from the debate around the Street Music Act championed by Michael Thomas Bass MP, indicating the irrelevance of the ballad-singer to the contemporary street scene. This argument, predicated upon technological change, literacy, economics, and class consciousness, is essentially optimistic, running counter to the rhetoric of decline and nostalgia found in nineteenth-century elite writing on the subject. I contend that the primarily musical transformation by which melodic song became subordinated within a new and totalising conception of music, was itself symptomatic of the great historical forces of reform, education, improvement, and enfranchisement that were at work in Victorian London.

With the aim of unravelling the role of popular culture in contemporary Caribbean writing, this essay focuses on how calypso, carnival and dancehall cultures have been used in the work of post-millennial Caribbean writers to examine issues of gender and sexuality. Caribbean writers employ innovative textual strategies, which draw thematically and stylistically from music and carnival. These textual strategies challenge the perceived boundaries between oral and scribal and between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures, and they can create a platform from which to challenge misogyny, patriarchy and social injustice in the contemporary Caribbean and beyond.

Mahler, who had mobilized the youth of his day against slovenly Tradition, reerupted into a newly youthful popular culture in the 1960s thanks to both the centenary of his birth and the advent of the long-playing record. Not only musicians were touched by the wave of new recordings; modern pop culture and youthful “avant-garde” now blithely bridged the once-opposed realms of “high” and “low” culture, opting for a more experimental and visionary one drawing on experiences of Zen, magic mushrooms, and LSD. Important examples of this trend are surveyed here, including the poetry of Jonathan Williams, the biopic by Ken Russell, the opening ceremony of the 2004 Athens Olympics, the recent dramatization of the Gustav/Alma relationship by Percy and Felix Adlon, and modern American television programming. The conflicts and contradictions that made Mahler’s works a marketing challenge in their own time enabled him to speak to us all, regardless of racial or cultural identity.