This chapter traces the personal and literary relationship between Elizabeth Bowen and the American writer Eudora Welty from their first meeting in 1950 until Bowen’s death in 1973. Letters reveal that the two writers, feeling a connection between their respective ‘souths’, Cork and Mississippi, found common ground in fiction and friendship. They travelled together and frequently commented on each other’s work in progress. Using archival records and extant correspondence, this chapter focuses on their travels together in 1951, when Bowen was lecturing in the American South. Bowen’s reception by women’s clubs and other female literary networks illustrates her literary status at mid-century while revealing the informal networking and paraliterary labour required for independent women to make a living by writing.

Across her fiction and non-fiction, Elizabeth Bowen is consistently intrigued by hotels. From the grand Italian Riviera establishment of her debut novel, The Hotel, to the series of dingy ‘back rooms in hotels … with no view’ occupied by Portia Quayne and her mother in The Death of the Heart, many of Bowen’s characters occupy, however briefly, the transitory, impermanent space of the hotel. Although characters move through hotel space, they are never left unmarked by it. Portia’s teacher observes her ‘hotel habits’, which she cannot shake. This chapter explores Bowen’s preoccupation with the space of the hotel in her writing, and demonstrates her acute sense not only of its unique spatiality, but also of the intricacies of hotel temporality. More specifically, I argue that Bowen is a writer who is profoundly sensitive to the relationship between people and the spaces they occupy, and this sensitivity comes to the fore in the hotel phenomenologies of her characters.

Florence Price’s contributions to the keyboard literature range from pedagogical works for beginners, many of which she composed for her own students, to expansive multi-movement pieces that were written with the concert musician in mind. In addition to their varying levels of difficulty, variety also comes in the form of their stylistic influences. African American folk idioms are prevalent, as are the sound worlds of nineteenth century Romanticism and early twentieth-century chromatic experimentalism. As this chapter shows, Price’s keyboard music additionally sheds light on the influence of the publishing industry and the market for these works. Ultimately, however, Price’s keyboard output provides a window into her impetus as an educator and composer, and reveals Price the pianist and organist who frequently programmed her unpublished works in her own recitals and played for pleasure.

Florence Price’s music expands the conversation around what musical analysis means for composers on the canonical fringes who draw upon influences outside a Western art music framework. This chapter recognizes the limitations of conventional Western music analysis in studies of Price’s music and suggests other modes of analytic inquiry that actively engage with interdisciplinary and intersectional resources. This chapter asks: What would it mean to hear and analyze Florence Price’s music intersectionally? What follows are case studies around select art songs that exemplify modes of assessing her compositions with serious analytical nuance, as well as hearing music through and with the composer. In addition to exploring greater possibilities for the analysis of Price’s music, this chapter confronts the detrimental impact of the exceptionalist narrative in discussions of her compositional ideas, stylistic sources, and career trajectory.

Had Giulio Strozzi not recognized Barbara as his daughter, she might have led an entirely different life. Like so many other illegitimate children, she could have grown up within one of Venice’s charitable institutions. This chapter explores the path not taken – the kind of opportunities available to musically talented girls who were not accepted by their family but instead abandoned at the foundling home called the Ospedale della Pietà. Documentation regarding the Ospedale’s musicians reveals the influences of governing patrician men and surrounding social conditions on these orphaned women’s musical activities. Despite strict regulation of women’s public performance, these nonelite female musicians developed successful lifelong musical careers and their own financial autonomy, somewhat comparable to Barbara Strozzi’s, by means of their musical skills, public popularity, and the resultant patronage.

Antonia Padoani Bembo and Barbara Strozzi both studied music with Francesco Cavalli. Bembo’s career apparently began when she was a young singer in Cavalli’s La Calisto and it lasted into her 70s, when she completed, among other compositions, a five-act opera and motets based on the complete penitential psalms. This chapter lists the pieces from her first book, Produzioni armoniche, that may have been composed during the years that she lived in Venice (c. 1640–77), when perhaps she came under the influence of Barbara Strozzi. All of Bembo’s manuscripts are preserved at the Paris Bibliothèque nationale and date from the years that she lived in France (1677–c.1720). In addition to the aforementioned works, these include sacred and secular music for three- and five-voice choir with accompaniment. In Paris, Bembo received support from King Louis XIV to live in a women’s community known as the “Petite Union Chrétienne.”

This essay reviews some of the music that Barbara Strozzi may have heard in Venetian churches and homes or sung and studied with her teachers, Nicolò Fontei and Francesco Cavalli. It introduces the terms “madrigal,” “aria,” “motet,” and “cantata” and considers the importance of guitar accompaniment in determining changes in aria styles in the 1620s and 1630s. In particular, I trace the use of refrains in both strophic arias and more complex through-composed pieces, a technique that was to prove important in the music of Strozzi’s Op. 1 (1644). Finally, I speculate on the identity of the lover Tirsi in the second of Strozzi’s Madrigali.

The Introduction outlines the role of Syrian intellectuals in shaping meaning around the 2011 revolution and its aftermath. It traces how early hope and discursive agency among intellectuals gave way to political fragmentation, repression, and exile, leading many to reassess their roles. It explores how exiled intellectuals engaged in a war of ideas, navigating pressures from authoritarian regimes, shifting public expectations, and host society constraints. Drawing on cultural sociology, intellectual positioning, and social movement theory, the Introduction situates Syrian intellectuals within global debates on public intellectualism, examining how political upheaval transforms their influence. The book investigates how exiled intellectuals’ work – once invested in revolutionary hope – became dominated by trauma narration, reshaping their discursive impact but weakening political efficacy. Through qualitative research, it examines how their meaning-making processes evolved, with broader implications for intellectuals in failed, or stalled, revolutionary movements.

“My Soul’s Been Anchored in the Lord” (1937) is one of Price’s most well-known concert spirituals due to Marian Anderson’s historic performance of the piece on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1939. Its continued inclusion in programs, especially by African American concert singers (such as Leontyne Price and Roberta Alexander, for example), has helped secure the work as an important contribution to the repertory of American art song. However, the song’s significance extends beyond its high-profile performances and sheds light on the significant legacy of the concert spiritual genre. This chapter’s analysis of several concert spirituals by Price reflects her embrace of and impact on this genre’s conventions and musical legacy.

This chapter explores the cultural reception of Pablo Neruda in China and Japan. Between 1949 and 1979, Neruda was among the most translated foreign writers in China, playing an essential role as a cultural diplomat for the Chinese government. In addition, he established a friendship with the poet Ai Qing (1910–1996), and their memory is still remembered through Ai Qing’s son Ai Weiwei (1957–), one of the most famous Chinese artists and activists today. Compared with his popularity in China, Neruda never received much critical attention in Japan. After World War II, the US occupation forced Japan to unwillingly become the centerpiece for America’s Cold War strategy in East Asia. Although the country never embraced communism as a significant political force, the essay argues that contemporary Japanese artists such as Taeko Tomiyama (1921–2021) and Nobu Takehisa (1940–) found inspiration in Neruda’s work regarding literature, art, politics, and nature in Latin America.

Written in February 2025, well after the completion of the monograph, the epilogue reflects on the fall of the Assad regime as a historic rupture while acknowledging the uncertainty of Syria’s post-revolutionary trajectory. While revolutionary ideals have been reaffirmed in historical narratives, their translation into governance, justice, and political inclusion remains unresolved. New actors now compete to define Syria’s future, shaping its ideological and institutional landscape. The chapter highlights how discursive battles over key political concepts – such as democracy, secularism, and governance – mirror a broader crisis of democracy, where increasingly questioned. It argues that the post-Assad moment has not ended Syria’s struggle for meaning but has transformed it into a contest over the principles that will shape the new order. The epilogue concludes that while something undeniably good has happened – the fall of a brutal dictatorship – the revolution’s aspirations remain incomplete. The task ahead is not to declare its success but to create the conditions in which its meaning continues to unfold.