Book contents
- The Cambridge Companion to Music and Romanticism
- Cambridge Companions to Music
- The Cambridge Companion to Music and Romanticism
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Musical Examples
- Contributors
- Preface
- Chronology
- Part I Horizons
- Part II Worlds
- 3 Music and Romantic Literature
- 4 Music, Romantic Landscape, and the Visual
- 5 Romanticism, the Folk, and Musical Nationalisms
- 6 Music, Romanticism, and Politics
- 7 Music and Technology
- 8 Music, Magic, and the Supernatural
- 9 A Kingdom Not of This World: Music, Religion, Art-Religion
- Part III Aesthetics
- Part IV Practices
- Part V Histories
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- References
3 - Music and Romantic Literature
from Part II - Worlds
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 August 2021
- The Cambridge Companion to Music and Romanticism
- Cambridge Companions to Music
- The Cambridge Companion to Music and Romanticism
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Musical Examples
- Contributors
- Preface
- Chronology
- Part I Horizons
- Part II Worlds
- 3 Music and Romantic Literature
- 4 Music, Romantic Landscape, and the Visual
- 5 Romanticism, the Folk, and Musical Nationalisms
- 6 Music, Romanticism, and Politics
- 7 Music and Technology
- 8 Music, Magic, and the Supernatural
- 9 A Kingdom Not of This World: Music, Religion, Art-Religion
- Part III Aesthetics
- Part IV Practices
- Part V Histories
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- References
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.
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- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Music and Romanticism , pp. 37 - 55Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021