Women and Music in the Age of Austen highlights the central role women played in musical performance, composition, reception, and representation, and analyzes its formative and lasting effect on Georgian culture. This interdisciplinary collection of essays from musicology, literary studies, and gender studies challenges the conventional historical categories that marginalize womens experience from Austens time. Contesting the distinctions between professional and amateur musicians, public and domestic sites of musical production, and performers and composers of music, the contributors reveal how womens widespread involvement in the Georgian musical scene allowed for self-expression, artistic influence, and access to communities that transcended the boundaries of gender, class, and nationality. This volumes breadth of focus advances our understanding of a period that witnessed a musical flourishing, much of it animated by female hands and voices. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
LINDA ZIONKOWSKI is the Samuel and Susan Crowl Professor of Literature at Ohio University in Athens. She is the author of Mens Work: Gender Class and the Professionalization of Poetry 16601784 and Women and Gift Exchange in Eighteenth-Century Fiction: Richardson Burney Austen and coeditor of The Culture of the Gift in Eighteenth-Century England. MIRIAM F. HART received her PhD at Ohio University in Athens after twenty years of touring as a singer recording with the Allman Brothers as well as with her group The Local Girls. She has performed at the White House on A Prairie Home Companion and at numerous musical festivals and venues across the United States. Her dissertation included the first complete photographic archiving of Austens songbooks.