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1 results

  • 3 - Music and Romantic Literature

  • from Part II - Worlds
  • Edited by Benedict Taylor, University of Edinburgh
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Music and Romanticism
    Published online:
    06 August 2021
    Print publication:
    26 August 2021, pp 37-55

  • 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.