
Resounding the Sublime
Music in English and German Literature and Aesthetic Theory, 1670-1850
Miranda Eva Stanyon(Author)
University of Pennsylvania Press
Published on 7. May 2021
Book
Hardback
304 pages
978-0-8122-5308-5 (ISBN)
Description
What does the sublime sound like? Harmonious, discordant, noisy, rustling, silent? Miranda Eva Stanyon rereads and resounds this crucial aesthetic category in English and German literatures of the long eighteenth century from a musical perspective and shows how sonorous sublimes lay at the heart of a central and transformative discourse. For Enlightenment and Romantic era listeners, the musical sublime represented a sonic encounter of the most extreme kind, one that tested what humans were capable of feeling, imagining, thinking, and therefore becoming.
The sublime and music have not always sung from the same hymn sheet, Stanyon observes. She charts an antagonistic intimacy between the two, 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. Offering readings of canonical texts by Longinus, Dryden, Burke, Klopstock, Herder, Coleridge, De Quincey, and others alongside lesser-known figures, she shows how the literary sublime was inextricable from musical culture, from folksongs and ballads to psalmody, polychoral sacred music, and opera. Deeply interdisciplinary, Resounding the Sublime draws literature into dialogue with sound studies, musicology, and intellectual and cultural history to offer new perspectives on the sublime as a phenomenon which crossed media, disciplines, and cultures.
An interdisciplinary study of sound in history, the book recovers varieties of the sublime crucial for understanding both the period it covers and the genealogy of modern and postmodern aesthetic discourses. In resounding the sublime, Stanyon reveals a phenomenon which was always already resonant. The sublime emerges not only as the aesthetic of the violently powerful, a-rational, or unrepresentable, but as a variegated discourse with competing dissonant, harmonious, rustling, noisy, and silent strains, one in which music and sound illustrate deep divisions over issues of power, reason, and representation.
The sublime and music have not always sung from the same hymn sheet, Stanyon observes. She charts an antagonistic intimacy between the two, 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. Offering readings of canonical texts by Longinus, Dryden, Burke, Klopstock, Herder, Coleridge, De Quincey, and others alongside lesser-known figures, she shows how the literary sublime was inextricable from musical culture, from folksongs and ballads to psalmody, polychoral sacred music, and opera. Deeply interdisciplinary, Resounding the Sublime draws literature into dialogue with sound studies, musicology, and intellectual and cultural history to offer new perspectives on the sublime as a phenomenon which crossed media, disciplines, and cultures.
An interdisciplinary study of sound in history, the book recovers varieties of the sublime crucial for understanding both the period it covers and the genealogy of modern and postmodern aesthetic discourses. In resounding the sublime, Stanyon reveals a phenomenon which was always already resonant. The sublime emerges not only as the aesthetic of the violently powerful, a-rational, or unrepresentable, but as a variegated discourse with competing dissonant, harmonious, rustling, noisy, and silent strains, one in which music and sound illustrate deep divisions over issues of power, reason, and representation.
Reviews / Votes
"This sophisticated comparatist study traces influential ideas of music's relationship with various conceptions of the sublime across aesthetic theory and literature of the long eighteenth century and the Romantic period, in English andGerman (translated by the author)...For literary scholars, philosophers, and theorists of music and aesthetics working on the ode, on affect, on rhetoric, or on pre-Romantic aesthetics, this book's detailed, learned map of transnational influences and affinities in ideas of the musical sublime will prove invaluable, as will its attractive argument for the centrality of sound to the sublime." (Modern Language Quarterly)More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Pennsylvania
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Product notice
Paper over boards
Dimensions
Height: 231 mm
Width: 155 mm
Thickness: 23 mm
Weight
558 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8122-5308-5 (9780812253085)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

Miranda Eva Stanyon
Resounding the Sublime
Music in English and German Literature and Aesthetic Theory, 1670-1850
E-Book
05/2021
1st Edition
University of Pennsylvania Press
€73.49
Available for download
Person
Miranda Eva Stanyon is Lecturer in Comparative Literature at King's College London and Research Fellow in English Literature at the University of Melbourne
Content
Contents
List of Abbreviations
Note on Translations and References
Introduction
Part I. He Rais'd a Mortal to the Skies; She Drew an Angel Down: English Literature, Circa 1670-1760
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
Part II. Hissing Snakes and Angelic Hosts: German Literature, Circa 1720-1770
Chapter 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 1770-1850
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
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Note on Translations and References
Introduction
Part I. He Rais'd a Mortal to the Skies; She Drew an Angel Down: English Literature, Circa 1670-1760
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
Part II. Hissing Snakes and Angelic Hosts: German Literature, Circa 1720-1770
Chapter 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 1770-1850
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
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments