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 -- Chapter 3. Reforming aesthetics : Bodmer and Breitinger's anti-musical sublime -- Chapter 4. Klopstock, rustling, and the antiphonal sublime -- 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.
Summary:
"Focusing on English and German texts and the intricate relationships between them, this book seeks to reread-or, perhaps better, re-sound-sublimity through the lens of music, 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 century. Closely reading a series of canonical and little-known literary and critical texts in dialogue with musical cultures, the book offers new perspectives on the sublime as a transdisciplinary, transmedial, and transcultural phenomenon. In doing so, it argues for the importance of sonic models to the sublime; it traces harmonious, discordant, and resolutely silent varieties of sublimity; and it suggests resonances between past sublimes and current aesthetics and ethics"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.