Poe and the Idea of Music

Failure, Transcendence, and Dark Romanticism

Charity McAdams (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

170 Seiten

2017
Lehigh University Press (Verlag)
978-1-61146-204-3 (ISBN)

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Edgar Allan Poe often set the scenes of his stories and poems with music: angels have the heartstrings of lutes, spirits dance, and women speak with melodic voices. These musical ideas appear to mimic the ways other authors, particularly Romanticists, used music in their works to represent a spiritual ideal artistic realm. Music brought forth the otherworldly, and spoke to the possible transcendence of the human spirit. Yet, Poe's music differs from these Romantic notions in ways that, although not immediately perceptible in each individual instance, cohere to invert Romantic idealism. For Poe, artistic transcendence is impossible, the metaphysical realm is unreachable, and humans cannot perceive anything but their own failure of spirit. In this book, I show how we can look at Poe's poems and stories on the whole to discover this, and in doing so, unpack some of Poe's mysticism along the way.

Charity McAdams is professor in the Barrett Honors College at Arizona State University.

Acknowledgements
Introduction
1Is This Divine? No, This is the Voice of a Woman.
Madame Malibran: The Very Genius of Music
“The Spectacles”: In Imitation of Malibran
The Alchemy of Unreason: Well and Strenuously Sung!
2Another Kind of Musician Altogether
“The Fall of the House of Usher”: The Guitar and the Ballad
The Case of the Ballad
“Ulalume”: Faëry Ballet
Indefinitiveness: The True Musical Expression
“Annabel Lee”: The Sounding Sea
“The Haunted Palace”: Spirits Moving Musically
3An Almost Magical Melody
“Ligeia”: Siren Who Never Sings
4The Wantonest Singing Birds
Poems as Songs in Language, Aim, and Purpose
Ventum Textilem: The Veil of the Soul
Mere Words: Birdsong
“Fanny”: Wild Death Song, Sweet and Clear
“Romance”: Unless It Trembled with the Strings
“Nameless Here For Evermore”: To Sing Well is to Avoid Naming
5The Starry Choir (And Other Listening Things)
Music of the Spheres: Music, in Our Own More Limited Sense of the Word
“Al Aaraaf”: Music o

Erscheinungsdatum	01.02.2018
Reihe/Serie	Perspectives on Edgar Allan Poe
Verlagsort	Cranbury
Sprache	englisch
Maße	158 x 237 mm
Gewicht	540 g
Themenwelt	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918)
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
ISBN-10	1-61146-204-5 / 1611462045
ISBN-13	978-1-61146-204-3 / 9781611462043
Zustand	Neuware