Laura Tunbridge is Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Manchester. She is the author of Schumann's Late Style (2007) and co-editor of Rethinking Schumann, as well as having contributed chapters and articles to The Cambridge Companion to Schumann (2007), The Musical Quarterly, Music and Letters, the Cambridge Opera Journal, Opera Quarterly and The Journal of the Royal Musical Association.

• Chronology; 1. Concepts; 2. Wanderers and balladeers; 3. Performance: the long nineteenth century; 4. Gendered voices; 5. Between opera and symphony; 6. Travels abroad; 7. Modern subjects; 8. Death of the song cycle; 9. Performance: the twentieth century; 10. Afterlife: the late twentieth century; 11. Rebirth: pop song cycles; Guide to further reading.

'Scholars and teachers will be grateful for the brand-new emphases on performing traditions and performers, on the 20th-century cycle, on the migrations of the song cycle into non-Germanic lands, and on the cycle in popular music. Much of this is original work, superbly done and beautifully written … Tunbridge's introductory chapter on concepts is the clearest approach (and the most thought-provoking) to vexed issues of definition I have ever encountered.' Susan Youens, J. W. Van Gorkom Professor of Music Musicology, University of Notre Dame