Inventing Percy Grainger - The Construction of Biography on Page, Stage and Screen

Investigates the dialogue and tensions between Percy Grainger's public biography and his self-conscious autobiographical construction via his own writings and autobiographical museum. The Australian-American composer Percy Grainger (1882-1961) described himself as an 'all round man': composer, pianist, artist, inventor, linguist, ethnographer, essayist, and more. He also went to great lengths to shape his own biographical narrative, developing an eccentric public persona in the press, writing extensive autobiographical texts and establishing a vast autobiographical museum. But what happens when this self-fashioned narrative meets writers, scholars, and creatives in the decades since his death? This book traces the construction and negotiation of Grainger's biography on page, stage and screen through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, exploring the tensions and dialogue between these and Grainger's autobiographical self. Through a series of case studies, with a focus on works created in Australia, the book explores how Grainger's public persona and received biographical narrative were developed then transformed by other writers, playwrights, filmmakers, and performanc…