Musical Wordsworth

Romantic Soundscape and Harmony

AvYimon Lo

Häftad, Engelska, 2025

Del 97 i serien Liverpool English Texts and Studies

476 kr

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Beskrivning

In his Essay of 1815, Wordsworth asserts that ‘a pure and refined scheme of harmony’ must prevail in all ‘higher poetry’. This idea of a structured and complex form of ‘harmony’ was similarly noted earlier in The Prelude (1805), where Wordsworth famously claimed that the human mind is ‘framed even like the breath / And harmony of music’.Musical Wordsworth presents an original understanding of Wordsworthian harmony by examining an organised but dynamic sense of musicality that shapes his poetic theory and practice. This book is the first study to draw on music psychology and aesthetics to interpret the function and mechanism of Wordsworth’s aural structure and movement. Engaging with scholarship from the fields of literature and music, it defines Wordsworth’s poetry and the imagination through musical conceptions, and establishes various modes and forms of poetic listening as experiences of musical performance and appreciation. Each chapter explores a pair of musical abstractions – Lyricism and Musicality; Breath and Harmony; Repetition and Resonance; Expectation and Surprise; Rhythm and Dynamics; Rest and Silence. Musical Wordsworth will be of interest to students and researchers of Romantic poetry, long nineteenth-century literature, and music.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2025-09-02
Mått:156 x 234 x undefined mm
Format:Häftad
Språk:Engelska
Serie:Liverpool English Texts and Studies
Antal sidor:232
Förlag:Liverpool University Press
ISBN:9781836245094

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Mer om författaren

Yimon Lo is Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Tübingen and Research Fellow at the University of Leuven.

Recensioner i media

‘In short, Musical Wordsworth’s exceptionally thorough look at how harmonic listening is treated in the poetry of William Wordsworth invites further consideration of how his conceptual engagements with the ear and sonic phenomena might resonate both with the ideas of his closest contemporaries and with recent theoretical work in sound studies questioning the ethical, environmental, and social dimensions of aurality as a distinctive mode of encounter. As Romantic studies continues to work out how sonic and aural dimensions of the period’s poetics might tap into a complex web of cross-disciplinary intellectual relationships, Musical Wordsworth will be sure to stand as an essential contribution in its assertion of Wordsworth as a theorist of the harmonic imagination.’ Elizabeth Weybright, The Wordsworth Circle

Innehållsförteckning

Introduction: ‘That voice of unpretending harmony’1. Lyricism and Musicality 2. Breath and Harmony: Nature and the Romantic Imagination 3. Repetition and Resonance: The Soundscape of Memory 4. Expectation and Surprise: From Disorientation to Sublime Breakthrough 5. Rhythm and Dynamics: Listening to Urban Poetics 6. Rest and Silence: Voices of Collective Memorialisation Coda: ‘The music in my heart’