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What does the sublime sound like? Miranda Stanyon traces competing varieties of the sublime, a crucial modern aesthetic category, as shaped by the antagonistic intimacies between music and language. In resounding the history of the sublime over the course of the long eighteenth century, she finds a phenomenon always already resonant.
List of contents
Contents
List of Abbreviations
Note on Translations and References
IntroductionPart I. He Rais'd a Mortal to the Skies; She Drew an Angel Down: English Literature, Circa 1670-1760Chapter 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 1720-1770Chapter 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 1770-1850Chapter 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
ConclusionNotes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
About the author
Miranda Eva Stanyon is Lecturer in Comparative Literature at King's College London and Research Fellow in English Literature at the University of Melbourne
Summary
What does the sublime sound like? Miranda Stanyon traces competing varieties of the sublime, a crucial modern aesthetic category, as shaped by the antagonistic intimacies between music and language. In resounding the history of the sublime over the course of the long eighteenth century, she finds a phenomenon always already resonant.
