Dear colleagues, I am very pleased to announce the publication of my book: Still Songs: Music In and Around the Poetry of Paul Celan (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012) http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calcTitle=1&title_id=10724&edition_id=14068 Best wishes, Axel Englund -- Axel Englund, PhD Department of Literature and History of Ideas Stockholm University SE-10691, Stockholm SWEDEN Now available from Ashgate Publishing… Still Songs: Music In and Around the Poetry of Paul Celan Axel Englund, Stockholm University, Sweden ‘This impressive debut book uses music, both as sound and as idea, to cut through the conventional wisdom about Paul Celan and to forge a more nuanced, more complex view of Celan’s poetics than the one afforded by the legends that have accumulated around the poet. Axel Englund shows with meticulous argument and in lucid prose that Celan’s lifelong return to figures of music forms a key arena for the playing out of his conflicted identity as a modern poet, and in particular as a poet whose modernity is overdetermined – but far from exhausted – by his experience as a survivor of the Holocaust.’ – Lawrence Kramer, Fordham University, USA ‘Axel Englund’s sophisticated study of Paul Celan combines the insights of a philologist with the keen ear of a composer-musicologist. It illuminates not only the extraordinary role that music plays in Celan’s conception of poetry, but also the singular impact his work has had on contemporary classical music. A milestone in Celan studies.’ – Mark M. Anderson, Columbia University, USA What does it mean for poetry and music to turn to each other in the shadow of the Holocaust, as means of aesthetic self-reflection? How can their mutual mirroring, of such paramount importance to German Romanticism, be reconfigured to retain its validity after the Second World War? These are the core questions of Axel Englund’s book, which is the first to address the topic of Paul Celan and music. Contents: Introduction: poetry and music in conflict and convergence; Play death sweeter: musicality, metaphoricity, murder; Fire in the harp, in her hair: the lied and the lullaby; Rises and plays: interruptive repetition and the law of musical purity; Into you, into you I sing: spasmodic speech and the borders of the human body; We resound: music in and beyond the first person plural; Shattered the songs: dissonances of a German-Jewish musicality; Bibliography; Index. Includes 2 b&w illustrations and 30 musical examples Sample pages for published titles are available to view online at: www.ashgate.com To order, please visit: www.ashgate.com All online orders receive a discount Alternatively, contact our distributor: Bookpoint Ltd, Ashgate Publishing Direct Sales, 130 Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4SB, UK Tel: +44 (0)1235 827730 Fax: +44 (0)1235 400454 Email: [log in to unmask]