How and why did the life and music of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) matter to experimental writers in the early twentieth century? Previous answers to this question have tended to focus on structural analogies between musical works and literary texts, charting the many different ways in which poe...

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Bibliographic Details

Main Author:	Waddell, Nathan 1983- (Author)
Format:	Book
Language:	English
Published:	Oxford Oxford University Press 2019
Subjects:	Beethoven, Ludwig van > 1770-1827 Geschichte 1900-1930 Moderne Literatur Rezeption Englisch Beethoven, Ludwig van / 1770-1827 / Influence English literature / 20th century / History and criticism American literature / 20th century / History and criticism Modernism (Literature) Beethoven, Ludwig van / 1770-1827 American literature English literature Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.) 1900-1999 Criticism, interpretation, etc
Summary:	How and why did the life and music of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) matter to experimental writers in the early twentieth century? Previous answers to this question have tended to focus on structural analogies between musical works and literary texts, charting the many different ways in which poetry and prose resemble Beethoven's compositions. This book takes a different approach. It focuses on how early twentieth-century writers-chief among them E.M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, Wyndham Lewis, Dorothy Richardson, Rebecca West, and Virginia Woolf-profited from the representational conventions associated in the nineteenth century and beyond with Beethovenian culture. 0The emphasis of Moonlighting falls for the most part on how modernist writers made use of Beethovenian legend. It is concerned neither with formal similarities between Beethoven's music and modernist writing nor with the music of Beethoven per se, but with certain ways of understanding Beethoven's music which had long before 1900 taken shape as habit, myth, cliche, and fantasy, and with the influence they had on experimental writing up to 1930. Moonlighting suggests that the modernists drew knowingly and creatively on the conventional. It proposes that many of the most experimental works of modernist literature were shaped by a knowing reliance on Beethovenian consensus; in short, that the literary modernists knew Beethovenian legend when they saw it, and that they were eager to use it
Physical Description:	xiv, 248 Seiten 6 Illustrationen und Portraits (Totenmasken) 24 cm
ISBN:	9780198816706 0198816707