This chapter explains how the emotionally expressive motions of characters can reveal their unmet psychological needs, which cultural and economic conditions do not allow them to fully acknowledge. These movements and the environments in which they unfold evoke subgenres of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novel including the marriage plot, the Gothic novel, the Victorian bildungsroman, and the sensation novel. These episodes featuring characters’ emotionally expressive motions invite us to understand these subgenres in a new light, as narratives that depict characters’ unfulfilled needs and respond to those of anticipated readers. The introduction situates this approach both with respect to recent work in novel studies and the earlier approaches of reader response theorists. The chapter also offers an extended interpretation of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, oriented around Clarissa’s expressive motions as she runs away from her family with Lovelace. This moment can be seen as the origin of episodes of getting lost.

The bulk of Part IV digs into the repertoire to explore the myriad ways composers activated an esthetics of opposition across a nearly 100-year span. Chapter 11 considers how Guillaume Du Fay’s early songs pit introductory melismas against densely texted phrases to create productive oppositions. The chapter also shows how Du Fay’s stunning Malheureulx cueur gives voice to the virelai form.

This chapter explores the impact of ‘subgenre qualifiers’ that modify a genre title and distinguish between, say, ‘melodic death metal’ and ‘progressive death metal’. Endemic within contemporary metal discourse, these qualifiers function both to describe and prescribe the specific focus of a given subgenre, affecting composition, production, performance and reception (among other areas). Focusing on technical death metal, the chapter investigates the prescriptive nature of creativity contained within a relatively precise definition of ‘technical’ developed through consistent usage by artists, reliable acknowledgement from audiences and continual reinforcement by critics. By examining discourse from critics and artists, we can observe how subgenre qualifiers are used creatively, sometimes cast as a conceptual constraint against which an artist struggles, sometimes interpreted as a challenge and an explicit focus for an artist’s musical endeavours. The chapter considers how artists and listeners navigate technical death metal’s delimited forms of expression as a case study of the ostensibly highly stratified nature of modern metal.