Resounding the Sublime: Music in English and German Literature and Aesthetic Theory, 1670-1850

The musical sublime of the long eighteenth century was a sonic encounter of the most extreme kind, testing what humans were capable of feeling, imagining, thinking, and becoming. Miranda Eva Stanyon's 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. It reveals 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.

\n Format: Hardback
\n Length: 304 pages
\n Publication date: 01 May 2021
\n Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
\n

The concept of the sublime has been explored extensively in both English and German literature of the long eighteenth century, with Miranda Eva Stanyon's Resounding the Sublime offering a fresh perspective from a musical angle. Stanyon argues that the musical sublime represented a profound sonic encounter that pushed the boundaries of human emotion, imagination, thought, and ultimately transformation. For listeners of the Enlightenment and Romantic eras, the musical sublime was a unique experience that tested the limits of what humans could feel, imagine, and become.

However, it is important to note that the relationship between the sublime and music has not always been harmonious. Stanyon charts an antagonistic intimacy between the two, tracing the rise of the sublime in the later seventeenth century, the upheavals associated with Kant in the late eighteenth century, and their reverberations in the nineteenth. Through readings of canonical texts by figures such as Longinus, Dryden, Burke, Klopstock, Herder, Coleridge, De Quincey, and others, alongside lesser-known figures, Stanyon demonstrates how the literary sublime was inextricably linked to musical culture, encompassing a wide range of genres from folk songs and ballads to psalmody, polychoral sacred music, and opera.

Resounding the Sublime is a deeply interdisciplinary study that draws upon sound studies, musicology, and intellectual and cultural history to offer new perspectives on the sublime as a phenomenon that transcended media, disciplines, and cultures. By engaging with literature in dialogue with these fields, Stanyon recovers varieties of the sublime that are crucial for understanding both the period it covers and the genealogy of modern and postmodern aesthetic discourses. The book reveals a phenomenon that was always already resonant, shedding light on the ways in which the sublime has influenced artistic expression and cultural discourse throughout history.

One of the key insights of Resounding the Sublime is that the sublime emerges not only as the aesthetic of the violently powerful but also as a response to the limitations and constraints of human existence. The sublime represents a longing for something beyond the ordinary, something that transcends the boundaries of everyday experience. It is a phenomenon that has been explored in various forms of art and literature throughout history, from ancient Greek philosophy to contemporary music.

In resonating the sublime, Stanyon reveals a phenomenon that was always already resonant within the human experience. The book offers a rich and nuanced exploration of the ways in which sound, music, and literature can evoke the sublime, challenging our understanding of what it means to be human and to engage with the world around us. Through its interdisciplinary approach, Resounding the Sublime provides a valuable contribution to the study of aesthetics, cultural history, and the human condition.

\n Weight: 580g\n
Dimension: 160 x 235 x 27 (mm)\n
ISBN-13: 9780812253085\n \n