Overview

What does the sublime sound like? Harmonious, discordant, noisy, rustling, silent? Miranda Eva Stanyon rereads and resounds this crucial aesthetic category in English and German literatures of the long eighteenth century from a musical perspective and shows how sonorous sublimes lay at the heart of a central and transformative discourse. For Enlightenment and Romantic era listeners, the musical sublime represented a sonic encounter of the most extreme kind, one that tested what humans were capable of feeling, imagining, thinking, and therefore becoming. The sublime and music have not always sung from the same hymn sheet, Stanyon observes. She charts an antagonistic intimacy between the two, from the sublime's rise to prominence in the later seventeenth century, through the upheavals associated with Kant in the late eighteenth century, and their reverberations in the nineteenth. Offering readings of canonical texts by Longinus, Dryden, Burke, Klopstock, Herder, Coleridge, De Quincey, and others alongside lesser-known figures, she shows how the literary sublime was inextricable from musical culture, from folksongs and ballads to psalmody, polychoral sacred music, and opera. Deeply interdisciplinary, Resounding the Sublime draws literature into dialogue with sound studies, musicology, and intellectual and cultural history to offer new perspectives on the sublime as a phenomenon which crossed media, disciplines, and cultures. An interdisciplinary study of sound in history, the book recovers varieties of the sublime crucial for understanding both the period it covers and the genealogy of modern and postmodern aesthetic discourses. In resounding the sublime, Stanyon reveals a phenomenon which was always already resonant. The sublime emerges not only as the aesthetic of the violently powerful, a-rational, or unrepresentable, but as a variegated discourse with competing dissonant, harmonious, rustling, noisy, and silent strains, one in which music and sound illustrate deep divisions over issues of power, reason, and representation.

Full Product Details

Author:   Miranda Eva Stanyon
Publisher:   University of Pennsylvania Press
Imprint:   University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN:  

9780812253085

ISBN 10:   0812253086
Pages:   277
Publication Date:   07 May 2021
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

Contents 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

Reviews

"""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 *"

""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)

""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 *

Author Information

Miranda Eva Stanyon is Lecturer in Comparative Literature at King's College London and Research Fellow in English Literature at the University of Melbourne

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