Schumann as Manfred
The most prominent composers in Germany during the 1850s-Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner, and Schumann-all liked to be compared to Byron.1 Berlioz thought he bore a physical resemblance to the poet and, in his youth, sought connections between their lives: he searched out Byron's acquaintances while traveling in Italy, read the "burning verse" in a confessional in St. Peter's, and threatened suicide in melodramatic manner after being rejected by Camille Moke. Both his overture Le corsair and Harold en Italie celebrate the Byronic wanderer, as do the first two books of Liszt's Annees de pelerinage, written in Switzerland and Italy in the company of Marie d'Agoult.2 Liszt's Byronic habit of persuading married women to forsake their husbands was shared by Wagner, whose Dutchman exemplifies the wanderer's threat to female virtue.3 Byron was appealing because he was a man of action as well as words, demonstrated not only by his notorious exploits as a lover, but also through his engagement with politics, consummated in what many frame as his "sacrifice" for the Greek cause at Missolonghi.4 Schumann's similarity to Byron, however, manifested itself in a quite different manner. While Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner were compared to the poet's own best hero-himself-Schumann's contemporaries aligned him with one of his fictional characters, Manfred. The comparison was significant, not least because presenting Schumann as Manfred served several purposes. It was a veiled means of discussing the composer's character and his failing health, of placing him within a particular historical context, and ultimately of questioning whether he belonged with the musicians "of the future" or with those of an earlier romantic generation. On a more general level, the comparison between Schumann and Manfred is an early example of the assimilation of the composer into the world of fiction-a tendency still very much apparent from his (and his wife Clara's) frequent appearances in films and novels today.
Anti-hero Worship: The Emergence of the "Byronic hero" Archetype in the Nineteenth Century
The works of poet Lord Byron were a tour de force over the course of the nineteenth century—from the serial release of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–1818), ever-famous poetry like Don Juan (1819), and his dramatic stage works, such as Manfred (1817), Byron can be noted as one of the most highly influential authors and artists of his time.1 Though Byronic style and traits were adopted by a variety of authors and poets throughout Europe, Byron’s influence stretched beyond the literary. Berlioz, Brahms, Schumann, Verdi, Tchaikovsky, Strauss, and other nineteenth-century composers also adopted Byronic plots or narrative elements and incorporated them into musical works.2 Aside from the polemical writing style and sensational authorial persona that mark his work as distinct, Byron also introduced a unique character type, the “Byronic hero.” This novel hero manipulated standard behaviors and plot outcomes associated with earlier conceptions
Code switching in Ahdaf Soueif's The Map of Love
This article examines the phenomenon of code switching in The Map of Love (1999) by the Egyptian—British writer Ahdaf Soueif. Though she chooses English as a medium for her creative expression, Soueif deploys Arabic in her narrative to represent different aspects of the linguistic and cultural norms of Egyptian society. The article's methodology is informed by Kachru's framework on contact literature and his categorization of the occurrence of literary code switching or bilingual creativity into different strategies that encompass cultural and linguistic processes. The results indicate the predominance in The Map of Love of the discourse strategies of employing lexical borrowing, culture-bound references and translational transfer. Finally, the article analyzes the functional motivation of code switching in the postcolonial context of the novel and how the use of certain creative strategies might enhance or diminish the narrative's effectiveness and readability.