Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture

Abstract

Introduction Part I. Vocality, Textuality, and the Silencing of the Female Voice: 1. The Gorgon and the nightingale: the voice of female lament and Pindar's Twelfth Pythian Ode 2. Music and the maternal voice in Purgatorio XIX 3. Ophelia's songs in Hamlet: music, madness and the feminine 4. Wordsworth and Romantic voice: the poet's song and the prostitute's cry Part II. Anxieties of Audition: 5. 'No women are indeed': the boy actor as vocal seductress in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century drama 6. Deriding the voice of Jeanette MacDonald: notes on psychoanalysis and the American film musical 7. Adorno and the Sirens: tele-phono-graphic bodies Part III. Women Artists: Vocality and Cultural Authority: 8. The diva doesn't die: George Eliot's Armgart 9. Rewriting Ophelia: fluidity, madness, and the voice in Louise Colet's La Servante 10. Staring the camera down: direct address and women's voices 11. The voice of lament: female vocality and performative efficacy in the Finnish-Karelian itkuvirsi Part IV. Maternal Voices: 12. The lyrical dimensions of spirituality: music, voice, and language in the novels of Toni Morrison 13. Red hot mamas: Bessie Smith, Sophie Tucker, and the ethnic maternal voice in American popular song 14. Maternalism and the material girl Nancy J. Vickers.