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Article: L. J. Rather, Reading Wagner: A Study in the History of Ideas.(Book review)
- Article from:
- Nineteenth-Century Prose
- Article date:
- December 22, 1991
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1991 Nineteenth-Century Prose. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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L. J. Rather, Reading Wagner: A Study in the History of Ideas (Louisiana State UP, 1990), xii + 349 pp., $35.00.
The literature on Wagner has typically been more prone to incursion by non-professionals than many other fields--some might term this a fitting response to Wagner's own brash invasions of territory better left to experts on literature, aesthetics, theology, medicine, and right living. Wagner's own thematic defense of the improvisational phenomenon (Meistersinger) can be seen as an argument in self-defense--Nietzsche was not the last to suffer the effrontery of Wagner's pontifications on any and all topics. This is not to say that anything goes in ...