Introduction

One of the cardinal notions about rivers and related water bodies is that they have immense social, cultural, spiritual, and economic significance. While the proof of the social, cultural, and spiritual significance of rivers was the objective of most of the previous chapters in this book, the last two chapters focus primarily on the economic aspects of the exploitation of rivers in Africa and the world at large. Both chapters explored the relationship between rivers and other water bodies (such as rivers and seas) in the forging of trade relationships between countries and undertaking intra-regional and international trades and exchanges. It goes without saying that rivers are important means of moving people, products, and ideas from one location to another. While a resilient future for international trade is anticipated by certain current trends and dynamics such as recent technological advancements, rise in the adoption and execution of regional multilateral agreements, and improvements in infrastructure building and transportation logistics, the fact, however, is that river transport systems in Africa are currently facing a multitude of challenges, including infrastructure deficits, security concerns, and environmental impacts. Rivers will remain a significant contributor to the delivery of the projected future of international trade, most especially in intra- African trade and export of agricultural produce, which depends largely on the use of rivers for production, management, processing, and transportation.

As the major economic activity embarked upon by humans since the dawn of time, agriculture is one of the important aspects of human needs, and rivers have been found to have utility and significance.

On 22 April 1947, the first performance of Béla Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra to be given in his native Hungary took place, some two years after the composer's death in exile in 1945. The work's accessibility immediately divided critical opinion. Modernists condemned its stylistic pluralism and genial virtuosity as a ruinous concession to popular taste; socialists proclaimed its emancipation from the ‘coldly lit world of the laboratory’ and praised its engagement with melody, harmony and counterpoint as agents of reception and sheer auditory pleasure.1 This, at last, was music that expressed the vox populi in the new socialist dispensation of postwar Hungary, but music which nevertheless belonged to one of the greatest European composers of the twentieth century. In a political regime which took its cue from Stalin's vehement indictments of formalism (condemnations which could and did lead to the concentration camp), the attenuation of Bartók's musical modernism in his last great work was not merely a matter of aesthetic preference or debate. It seemed instead to signal – however fortuitously – the collapse of a musical progressivism that had championed the serial (and resolutely non-tonal) hegemony of European modernism which would endure in the West, but which in the East would be decisively supplanted by the restoration of tonality and of ‘music for the people’.

Writing about the possibility of ‘Yeats as an Example’, Seamus Heaney tried to characterise the relationship between biography and art that Yeats's work constantly affirms in the following way:

All through his life, and ever since his death, Yeats has been continually rebuked for the waywardness of his beliefs, the remoteness of his behaviour and the eccentricity of his terms of reference. Fairies first of all. Then Renaissance courts in Tuscany and Big Houses in Galway. Then Phases of the Moon and Great Wheels. What, says the reliable citizen, is the sense of all this? Why do we listen to this gullible aesthete rehearsing the delusions of an illiterate peasantry, this snobbish hanger-on in country houses mystifying the feudal facts of the class system, this charlatan patterning history and predicting the future by a mumbo-jumbo of geometry and Ptolemaic astronomy? Our temptation may be to answer on the reliable citizen's terms, let him call the tune, and begin to make excuses for Yeats.

The only detriment to Heaney's rhetoric is that no one needs to make excuses for W. B. Yeats, whose poetry lives at once in the world and as an expression of Irish history (depending on who reads it). The fallibility, the mere vulnerability of Yeats as a man disappears sooner or later into the imperishable resilience of the poetry, even if his biographers are also historians who remind us that there is another Yeats, a determined apologist for the enterprise of art in the vision of Ireland which he helped to create, with or without the fairies.

Many pages have been filled regarding the question whether there was one Enlightenment, or many: that is, if there was one encompassing intellectual movement, or if there was a variety of different manifestations and appropriations, a history of intellectual entanglements for which ‘even the Hasidic Jews qualify’. A researcher's position on that matter will strongly depend on their disciplinary background and the resulting methodological toolkits: intellectual historians in a classical sense, who consider their voices as part of the public debate, will lean towards more essentializing approaches which, more or less explicitly, support a political narrative that roots ‘Western values’ in the eighteenth century. Followers of a conceptually more advanced history of science and scholarship, on the other hand, will put more emphasis on the preferred topics of the cultural turn, like practices, spaces and materialities, thereby, often deliberately, cutting ties with politics and science journalism.

To be sure, intellectual historians have also made efforts to re-contextualize and de-essentialize the epic of the Enlightenment. But what is the result for a public debate, in the German-speaking world and elsewhere, in which the historical self-assuring of liberal democracies is so intimately tied to a rather a-historical concept of ‘Aufklärung’?

What can productively be observed in the discussion, however, is the way in which present academic cultures, embedded in a variety of different political and media settings, strongly shape the view of a historical object which in itself is fluid and the result of decades-long processes of positive and negative intellectual genealogizing.

In an essay published in The New York Review of Books on 5 October 2023, George B. Stauffer remarked that the Metropolitan Opera in New York ‘has not presented an opera written by a woman since Kaija Saariaho's L’Amour de loin in 2016’. ‘More astonishing still’, Stauffer continues, ‘in the 140 years since its founding in 1883, the Met has produced only one other work by a female composer: Ethel M. Smyth's Der Wald (The Forest) in 1903. Given the remarkable advances in equality made by women in America and Europe in the past fifty years, including entry into professional music circles, that is a jaw-dropping statistic’.

This kind of marginal presence would not come as an astonishment, however, to those musicologists (many of whom are women) currently preoccupied by the retrieval of women composers, and indeed of women musicians generally, from the archives of silence. While it is unmistakably the case that the contribution of women to art music as performers (notably in opera and on the concert platform), and more recently as conductors, is a subject of incremental interest to journalists, scholars and film-makers (among many other people), the programming and circulation of music written by women remains peripheral not only in North America, but throughout Europe. In Ireland, initiatives such as the Women and Music in Ireland conferences (2010–2012) and the volume of the same name arising from these proceedings (published in 2023), together with the Sounding the Feminists project (2017–2023) have mapped both the extent of this neglect and the means of redressing it.

The next morning saw the two once again on the veranda. “Well, Franzl, let's stick to the plan. Article One: How did you sleep? Article Two: What did you dream about?”

“I’m afraid it was a bit confused. I saw Szabo, the old colonel, in a company of beautiful ladies, who immediately formed a circle around him, full of curiosity. And then a voice told me that they would be talking about me. So I went into a window recess, the better to listen in, which is improper, but in three quarters of comedies, there's someone eavesdropping—so you must forgive me if I can't shed all of my old habits immediately. At least not in my dreams.”

“Nor should you. Stay just as you are. But go on, go on. You were eavesdropping.”

“Yes, for a while, at least. But very soon, I crept closer and could see that the circle of beautiful women had turned into a circle of old military men, all with thick gold epaulettes, and only Szabo seemed the same. But when I took a closer look, it wasn't Szabo anymore but Gorgey.”

“You saw the picture in the gallery, and that's how it got into your dream. Or is this all fiction?”

“Fiction and truth. I altered it a little, to make a bridge.” “A bridge? Where to? What for?”

“To questions that seem political, but really aren’t. They’re questions that are very personal—questions about life.”

Remembrance, the annual commemoration of men and women killed in the service of the nation, the empire and later the commonwealth, was created in the aftermath of the First World War. It differs in several ways from the early modern state anniversaries. The state did not order a religious anniversary, require church services or appoint a holiday, and in most of the inter-war years the commemoration was spread over two or even three days. Remembrance consisted of several types of commemoration, initiated and developed piecemeal by different authorities during a period of seven years, from 1919 to 1925, and was shaped to a considerable degree by public opinion, in a democratization of national commemoration. This democratic effect, indicative of large social, religious and political changes since the early modern period, was especially evident in local communities, where commemoration consisted not just of church services but also of public ceremonies associated with the tens of thousands of war memorials that were constructed in cities, towns and villages throughout the United Kingdom.

The national, imperial and commonwealth commemorations, the subject of this edition, have four main elements. Two were organized by the state on a fixed date: a two-minute silence throughout the empire, and a ceremony at the Cenotaph, the imperial war memorial in London. The heads of the Church of England and the Church of Scotland recommended religious services and prayers. The Church of England archbishops encouraged a diversity of local observances, to suit the circumstances of particular churches, in a marked change from its earlier practices.

An American seaman usually became a prisoner of war in France because of the judgment on the nationality of the vessel on which he was captured; his possible release would depend upon the judgment on his own nationality and, later, on the reason for his presence on the prize vessel. What was documented about him at every point was referred to repeatedly by the French when making a decision concerning him. Each case was decided individually and depended upon a range of documentation originating with and held by a range of French ministries. This chapter looks at those ministries, at how those decisions were made and at the men who made them.

The Ministry of Marine and Colonies documented a seaman's initial disembarking in France from a prize vessel or his crawling onto a beach from a wrecked vessel. The Ministry of Police General held him in a local jail while a prize was being judged. Once he became a prisoner of war, he was escorted to a depot and detained there by the Ministry of War. Depending upon his fortunes and behaviour, other authorities touched his life. If he broke a civil law (committed murder, theft or affray, for example) it was the Ministry of Police General that pursued him, the Ministry of Justice that prosecuted him, the Ministry of the Interior that jailed him. If he escaped, it was the Gendarmerie that pursued him and the Ministry of War that sent out bulletins with his description to the authorities in the coastal cities (the destinations of most escapees, who hoped to get onto a vessel leaving France).

There was a time when ‘Berlioz the critic’ would have been the title of a lesser chapter in the larger biography of the composer. Now that his complete literary works have become available in modern critical editions, however, it has been possible to wonder, with more than a modicum of seriousness, whether Berlioz displayed his greatest talents as a musician or as a writer. For Berlioz himself, this was not a question. Setting down words, he often said, as in chapter 21 of his Memoirs, was ‘work’, while setting down notes was a ‘delight’. Many are the passages in his letters where he tells of the thrill of musical ideas coming to him so fast as to be unmanageable: ‘To tell you the truth, for several days I have been unable to sleep, I’ve lost touch with reality, so absorbed have I been by my work [Roméo et Juliette]’; ‘the music settled readily upon the words like a bird on a ripe fruit [the love scene from act 4 of Les Troyens]’; ‘the music is crowding my brain; I cannot even tell which number I prefer [in Béatrice et Bénédict]’. Years earlier, at the very moment he veered away from the medical study prescribed by his father in order to embrace harmony and counterpoint, he expressed extraordinary confidence in his musical future: ‘I am involuntarily drawn to a magnificent career’, he wrote in 1824; ‘I am certain that I shall distinguish myself in music […]; I should like to make a name for myself; I should like to leave upon this earth a trace of my existence’.

On returning to Deal from Eastry in October 1786, Elizabeth Carter wrote to Elizabeth Vesey describing the view from the churchyard: I took a solitary walk one evening to a church about two miles distant, and sat myself down upon the pedestal of a dial, to survey a prospect with which I think you would have been charmed. Before me was a most beautiful landscape of hill and dale, woodland and open field. Opposite to this the spires of a distant town, terminated by a long extent of calm blue sea, and the white cliffs of the isle of Thanet. On another side was a rough romantic mount, which sunk abruptly into a deep woody dell.—Now do not think I have been playing one of your tricks, and describing places and things formed only in your own brilliant imagination; for I really and truly did see all that I have endeavoured to describe. I wish I could complete it by sending you an epitaph, much beyond the common style of church-yard poetry, but it required more time than the setting sun would allow me to make out some of the lines, which were almost effaced by time.

Revealing an encompassing prospect, the churchyard forms the centre of a rural landscape. The topography is briefly sketched, but its specific locality and status as a ‘real’ place is mapped through Carter's two-mile walk to the churchyard, permitted by fine weather.

The representation and reinterpretation of hospitality in Judges 19 invite analysis through multiple dimensions: linguistic and textual, religious and philosophical, social, political, and sexual. All these domains intersect and inevitably link together from the perspective of hospitality. When we follow the links, risks and possibilities come into view. “Lethal differences”3 arise, often to be subtly undermined, as we move around a circuit connecting books and bodies: from textual bodies, metaphorical bodies, and real bodies made of flesh and blood, to books open or closed, held high and falling down, scroll or codex on parchment skins scraped clean of flesh and blood. In Vienna 2554 bodies become books and books bodies. As we shall see, these biblical encounters cover the gamut of possibilities explored in previous chapters – opposition and conflict, dialogue and relationship, experience and contamination, all in play in the struggle between Judaism and Christianity, Jews and Christians. In this chapter, hosting quarrels continue, adding new dimensions to the contact zone, as Hebrew Tanakh meets Old Testament and New through translatio, and encounter as confrontation hides in the rivalry between Ecclesia and Synagoga.

Emerging during the Celtic Tiger period, Riverdance first debuted as an interval entertainment act during the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest and was developed as a full-length stage show the following year. Following a dispute with producers, Michael Flatley, the lead man dancer in the original interval act, left Riverdance to produce his own show Lord of the Dance (1996), and subsequently created numerous follow-up shows including Feet of Flames (1998), Celtic Tiger (2005), and Lord of the Dance: Dangerous Games (2014). Since then, Flatley's Lord of the Dance has been seen by over 60 million people in 60 different countries, “making it one of the most successful dance productions in the world”. His total number of productions are said to have grossed more than $1 billion dollars. Since its debut, Riverdance has also sold over 11,000 shows across 46 countries and has been seen live by over 25 million people.

With this resounding success, both Riverdance and Flatley's dance shows provided a new world-wide platform for Irish traditional music and dance, ultimately aiding the commercial music industry expansion and consumer consumption of Irish culture. Bearing in mind the number of platforms provided by these shows, particularly for women, the implications and the roles available to performers are significant.

“The Rolling Hills of Ireland”: Understandings of Irishness

Emerging during the Celtic Tiger period, Riverdance and Flatley's Irish dance shows capitalised on and benefited from the “Celtic Tide” and the increased consumption of Irish culture. In doing this, they reinforced the correlation between Irishness and Celticity through the use of Celtic imagery displayed on the dancer's costumes, wigs, staging, and music.