Angelic Airs, Subversive SongsMusic was at once one of the most idealized and one of the most contested art forms of the Victorian period. Yet this vitally important nineteenth century cultural form has been studied by literary critics mainly as a system of thematic motifs. Angelic Airs, Subversive Songs positions music as a charged site of cultural struggle, promoted concurrently as a transcendent corrective to social ills and as a subversive cause of those ills. Alisa Clapp