Search results for ""author roderick cavaliero""

Before unification, Germany was a loose collection of variously sovereign principalities, nurtured on deep thought, fine music and hard rye bread. It was known across Europe for the plentiful supply of consorts to be found among its abundant royalty, but the language and culture was largely incomprehensible to those outside its lands. In the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries- between the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648 and unification under Bismarck in 1871 - Germany became the land of philosophers, poets, writers and composers. This particularly German cultural movement was able to survive the avalanche of Napoleonic conquest and exploitation and its impact was gradually felt far beyond Germany's borders. In this book, Roderick Cavaliero provides a fascinating overview of Germany's cultural zenith in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He considers the work of Germany's own artistic exports - the literature of Goethe and Grimm, the music of Wagner, Schumann, Mendelssohn and Bach and the philosophy of Schiller and Kant - as well as the impact of Germany on foreign visitors from Coleridge to Thackeray and from Byron to Disraeli. Providing a comprehensive and highly-readable account of Germany's cultural life from Frederick the Great to Bismarck, 'Genius, Power and Magic' is fascinating reading for anyone interested in European history and cultural history.

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Romanticism had its roots in fantasy and fed on myth'. So Roderick Cavaliero introduces the European Romantic obsession with the Orient.Cavaliero draws on a life-time's research in Romantic literature and introduces a rich cast of leading Romantic writers,artists,musicians and travellers,including Beckford,Byron, Shelley,Walter Scott,Pierre Loti,Thomas Moore,Rossini,Eugene Delacroix,Thackeray and Disraeli,and a host of other Romantics,who were drawn to the Orient in the 18th and 19th centuries.They luxuriate in its exotic sights,sounds,literature and,above all, in the prevailing mythology.Cavaliero analyses the Romantic vision where,as Byron writes, there are 'virgins soft as the roses they twine',but lays bare an underlying vision of cruelty and oppression, and of societies based on domestic or prisoner slavery - anathema to the 19th-century Romantic. The overarching myth was that of the Ottoman Empire,a huge and exotic superpower,an empire to rival Rome,a major threat to Europe, with an invincible military record ruled by a Sultan with absolute, even feckless, power of life and death over his subjects who lived to 'delight his senses'.But to the Romantics,fear of the absolute ruler was overlaid by frissons of oriental luxury. Thus the Ottoman Sultans were the heirs of the iconic Caliphate of Harun ar Rashid in the fabulous Arabian Nights Entertainments.Coleridge's dream of the Orient in Kubla Khan was not of the barbaric grandeur of the global Mongol empire but that of a 'stately pleasure dome in Xanadu' among incense-bearing trees and untroubled forests. Moore's Lalla Rookh was set in his visionary vale of Kashmir and is a love story in 'a land of kingfishers and golden orioles' with the backdrop of the mighty Moghul Empire. Scott was obsessed by the chivalry of the Crusades on both sides and Disraeli was fascinated by the interplay of the Abrahamic faiths and the hopes of peace in the Holy Land. Dualism runs through Romantic writing even when European realpolitik and modern nationalism are involved - as in the Greek revolt against Ottoman rule and the decline of Turkey as a great power. But above all for the Romantics the Orient remained mysterious and inviting. Cavaliero's Ottomania will delight all readers interested in tales of the exotic Orient, and the literature of the Romantic movement - a rich treasure-house of poets, novelists and travellers.

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