Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"This sophisticated comparatist study traces influential ideas of music’s relationship with various conceptions of the sublime across aesthetic theory and literature of the long eighteenth century and the Romantic period, in English andGerman (translated by the author)...For literary scholars, philosophers, and theorists of music and aesthetics working on the ode, on affect, on rhetoric, or on pre-Romantic aesthetics, this book’s detailed, learned map of transnational influences and affinities in ideas of the musical sublime will prove invaluable, as will its attractive argument for the centrality of sound to the sublime." * Modern Language Quarterly *
Table of ContentsContents
List of Abbreviations
Note on Translations and References
Introduction
Part I. He Rais'd a Mortal to the Skies; She Drew an Angel Down: English Literature, Circa 1670-1760
Chapter 1. Music as a "Bastard Imitation of Persuasion"? Power and Legitimacy in Dryden and Dennis
Chapter 2. "What Passion Cannot Musick Raise and Quell!" Passionate and Dispassionate Sublimity with the
Hillarians and Handelians
Part II. Hissing Snakes and Angelic Hosts: German Literature, Circa 1720-1770
Chapter 3. Reforming Aesthetics: Bodmer and Breitinger's Anti-Musical Sublime
Chapter 4. Klopstock, Rustling, and the Antiphonal Sublime
Part III. Sublime Beauty and the Wrath of the Organ: English and German Literature, Circa 1770-1850
Chapter 5. The Beauty of the Infinite: Herder's Sublimely-Beautiful, Beautifully-Sublime Music
Chapter 6. The Terror of the Infinite: Thomas De Quincey's Reverberations
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
