{"product_id":"poe-and-the-idea-of-music-failure-transcendence-and-dark-romanticism-9781611462067","title":"Poe and the Idea of Music: Failure,","description":"\u003cb\u003eBook Synopsis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEdgar Allan Poe often set the scenes of his stories and poems with music: angels have the heartstrings of lutes, spirits dance, and women speak with melodic voices. These musical ideas appear to mimic the ways other authors, particularly Romanticists, used music in their works to represent a spiritual ideal artistic realm. Music brought forth the otherworldly, and spoke to the possible transcendence of the human spirit. Yet, Poe's music differs from these Romantic notions in ways that, although not immediately perceptible in each individual instance, cohere to invert Romantic idealism. For Poe, artistic transcendence is impossible, the metaphysical realm is unreachable, and humans cannot perceive anything but their own failure of spirit. In this book, I show how we can look at Poe's poems and stories on the whole to discover this, and in doing so, unpack some of Poe's mysticism along the way.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTrade Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCharity McAdams' fascinating, thorough, and luminous book is the key to understanding Poe's poetic idealism. That idealism conceives of itself as fundamentally musical. So we need to understand what music meant to Poe. This book gives us that understanding, by carefully mapping, for the first time, the relationship between Poe's words, the music he might have heard, and the music he imagined beyond the reach of our ears. It is a unique contribution both to Poe scholarship, and to the study of the relationship between poetry and music in the 19th century. -- Peter Dayan, Universities of Edinburgh and Aalborg\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTable of Contents\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAcknowledgements\u003cbr\u003eIntroduction\u003cbr\u003e1Is This Divine? No, This is the Voice of a Woman.\u003cbr\u003eMadame Malibran: The Very Genius of Music\u003cbr\u003e“The Spectacles”: In Imitation of Malibran\u003cbr\u003eThe Alchemy of Unreason: Well and Strenuously Sung!\u003cbr\u003e2Another Kind of Musician Altogether\u003cbr\u003e“The Fall of the House of Usher”: The Guitar and the Ballad\u003cbr\u003eThe Case of the Ballad\u003cbr\u003e“Ulalume”: Faëry Ballet\u003cbr\u003eIndefinitiveness: The True Musical Expression\u003cbr\u003e“Annabel Lee”: The Sounding Sea\u003cbr\u003e“The Haunted Palace”: Spirits Moving Musically\u003cbr\u003e3An Almost Magical Melody\u003cbr\u003e“Ligeia”: Siren Who Never Sings\u003cbr\u003e4The Wantonest Singing Birds\u003cbr\u003ePoems as Songs in Language, Aim, and Purpose\u003cbr\u003eVentum Textilem: The Veil of the Soul\u003cbr\u003eMere Words: Birdsong\u003cbr\u003e“Fanny”: Wild Death Song, Sweet and Clear\u003cbr\u003e“Romance”: Unless It Trembled with the Strings\u003cbr\u003e“Nameless Here For Evermore”: To Sing Well is to Avoid Naming\u003cbr\u003e5The Starry Choir (And Other Listening Things)\u003cbr\u003eMusic of the Spheres: Music, in Our Own More Limited Sense of the Word\u003cbr\u003e“Al Aaraaf”: Music of the Passion-Hearted\u003cbr\u003e“Israfel”: Sweetest Voice of All God’s Creatures\u003cbr\u003ePower of Words: The Naiad Voice that Addresses Them From Below\u003cbr\u003e6But Gradually my Songs They Ceased\u003cbr\u003e“The Cask of Amontillado”: The Conical Cap and Bells\u003cbr\u003e“The Bells”: What a World of Solemn Thought Their Monody Compels\u003cbr\u003e“A Pæan”: The Requiem for the Loveliest Dead\u003cbr\u003e“The Masque of the Red Death”: The Music Swells, and the Dreams Live, and Writhe\u003cbr\u003eConclusion\u003cbr\u003eAppendix\u003cbr\u003eAn Inherited Musical Talent\u003cbr\u003eThe Idea without Music: Decontextualizing Poe\u003cbr\u003e‘The Rational Agent of Enchantment Itself’: Absolute Music and the Music of the Spheres\u003cbr\u003eBibliography","brand":"Lehigh University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51041682751831,"sku":"9781611462067","price":31.5,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0817\/1739\/5799\/files\/9781611462067.jpg?v=1750951285","url":"https:\/\/bookcurl.com\/products\/poe-and-the-idea-of-music-failure-transcendence-and-dark-romanticism-9781611462067","provider":"Book Curl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}