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3 - Music and Romantic Literature

from Part II - Worlds

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 August 2021

By
Miranda Stanyon
Edited by
Benedict Taylor
Benedict Taylor
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
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Summary

This chapter outlines the work of music for Romantic literature. The Romantic era was a pivotal period in the formation of literature as we now tend to understand it, as a category of imaginative and expressive prose and poetry, and writers deployed music in a number of ways to explore the power, limits, and nature of the literary. While lofty claims were made for literature as an ideal art form, one of the strongest uses of music for literature was to suggest its failures – to indicate kinds of freedom, fulfilment, and plenitude only pointed to by verbal language. The paradoxical uses of failure are discussed in this chapter through texts by writers including Blake, Kleist, Hoffmann, Coleridge, and Mérimée.

Keywords

music and languagelinguistic failuresound studiesmusic as literary figureWilliam BlakeSamuel Taylor ColeridgeProsper Merimée
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Companion to Music and Romanticism , pp. 37 - 55
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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References

Further Reading

Barry, Kevin. Language, Music and the Sign (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).Google Scholar
Chapin, Keith Moore, and Clark, Andrew Herrick (eds.). Speaking of Music: Addressing the Sonorous (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013).Google Scholar
Esterhammer, Angela. Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).Google Scholar
Gess, Nicola, and Honold, Alexander (eds.). Handbuch Literatur & Musik (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017).Google Scholar
Hoeveler, Diane. Long: Gothic Riffs: Secularizing the Uncanny in the European Imaginary, 1780–1820 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010).Google Scholar
Jamme, Christoph, and Cooper, Ian (eds.). The Impact of Idealism: The Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought, vol. 3: Aesthetics and Literature, ed. Boyle, Nicholas and Disley, Liz (4 vols.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).Google Scholar
Kittler, Friedrich, Macho, Thomas, and Weigel, Sigrid (eds.). Zwischen Rauschen und Offenbarung: zur Kultur- und Mediengeschichte der Stimme (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2002).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. Musica ficta: Figures of Wagner, trans. McCarren, Felicia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).Google Scholar
Lubkoll, Christina. Mythos Musik: Poetische Entwürfe des Musikalischen in der Literatur um 1800 (Freiburg: Rombach, 1995).Google Scholar
McClary, Susan (ed.). Georges Bizet: Carmen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McLane, Maureen. Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).Google Scholar
Stanyon, Miranda. Resounding the Sublime: Music in English and German Literature and Aesthetic Theory, 1670–1850 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021).Google Scholar
Thym, Jürgen (ed.). Of Poetry and Song: Approaches to the Nineteenth-Century Lied (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2010).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weliver, Phyllis, and Ellis, Katharine (eds.). Words and Notes in the Long Nineteenth Century (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2013).Google Scholar
Wood, Gillen D’Arcy. Romanticism and Music Culture in Britain, 1770–1840: Virtue and Virtuosity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).Google Scholar

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