Pushkin's palaces or Dostoevsky's slums? Many a modern-day visitor to St. Petersburg has one or, more likely, both of these images in mind when setting foot in this stage set-like setting for some of the world's most treasured literary ...

This book undoes 50 years of mythmaking about Stravinsky's life in music. During his spectacular career, Igor Stravinsky underplayed his Russian past in favor of a European cosmopolitanism. Richard Taruskin has refused to take the composer at his ...

Drawing from early modern plays and treatises on the precepts and practices of the acting process, this study shows how the early modern Spanish actress subscribed to various somatic practices in an effort to prepare for a role. It provides today ...

Why do people tell dirty jokes? And what is it about a joke's dirtiness that makes it funny? G. Legman was perhaps the foremost scholar of the dirty joke, and as legions of humor writers and comedians know, his Rationale of the Dirty Joke remains ...

Through the centuries, Gypsies all over the world have been misunderstood, maligned, rejected. Outcasts of the countries in which they live, they have wandered for centuries over the face of the earth. They have no homeland, no political unity ...

During the nineteenth century child musicians could be seen performing in the streets of cities across Europe and North America. Although they came from a number of countries, Italians were most associated with street music. In The Little Slaves ...