Operatic Geographies: The Place of Opera and the Opera House
- Submitting institution
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University of Oxford
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 316306
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
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- Publisher
- The University of Chicago Press Books
- ISBN
- 9780226596013
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- April
- Year of publication
- 2019
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The volume of essays was conceived by Aspden to address the ways in which opera and its urban environment have developed conjointly throughout the genre’s 400-year history. For the conference (2014), which formed the initial stimulus for the publication, Aspden actively invited the majority of speakers (rather than selecting them by open call). In the subsequent preparation of the volume, Aspden assembled contributors who would address different periods and elements in that 400-year span, using the lens of cultural geography; five of the eventual sixteen volume contributors were specifically selected to address gaps in coverage amongst those papers taken forward for publication from the volume. The contributors were asked to respond to the ideas outlined in Aspden’s editorial Introduction, which was shared early in the process. Aspden worked through different iterations of chapters with the authors (with strong editorial interference and re-writing in places), shaping both the overall trajectory and details of the book. Through these initiatives, Aspden developed a narrative arc, charting a move from the peripatetic and contingent nature of late seventeenth-century opera and its venues, to the establishment of opera houses as defining civic spaces in their own right in the eighteenth century, to the opera house (and opera-going) as cultural commodity and source of regional, national and international territorial definition in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to the challenges and disillusionments attending on that success and diffusion of the operatic ideal in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
In addition to the Introduction (5,700 words), Aspden authored Chapter 14 (7,000 words). Several other contributors came from the Unit of Assessment: Michael Burden (chapter 4: 6,700 words), Yvonne Liao (chapter 11: 6,700 words), and Peter Franklin (chapter 12: 7,200 words).
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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