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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.
The 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, cliché, 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.
About the author
Nathan Waddell is a Senior Lecturer in Early Twentieth-Century and Modernist Literature in the Department of English Literature at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of Modern John Buchan (2009) and Modernist Nowheres: Politics and Utopia in Early Modernist Writing, 1900-1920 (2012), and a co-editor of several volumes of scholarly essays, including: Wyndham Lewis and the Cultures of Modernity (2011); Utopianism, Modernism, and Literature in the Twentieth Century (2013); John Buchan and the Idea of Modernity (2013); Wyndham Lewis: A Critical Guide (2015); and 'Brave New World': Contexts and Legacies (2016).
Summary
Moonlighting offers a new and original account of how early twentieth-century Anglo-American modernist writers were influenced by the life and music of one of modernity's most important and most celebrated figures: the German composer Ludwig van Beethoven.
Additional text
a brilliant account of the ways in which Beethoven's work was perceived, consumed and transformed by the writers of the modernist era. It is a work of tremendous erudition, full of thought-provoking ideas, conveyed with zest, discrimination and enthusiasm. Scholars of literature and music will discover something new on every page, and the general reader will marvel at the breadth and scope of this excellent book.
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Moonlighting is particularly enlightening in its commentary on representations of women performing Beethoven. Scott McCracken, Pilgrimages: A Journal of Dorothy Richardson Studies (PUBLICATION)
