Title Moonlighting : Beethoven and literary modernism / Nathan Waddell

Edition First edition Published Oxford, United Kingdom : Oxford University Press, 2019

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Description 1 online resource (xiv, 248 pages) : illustrations Contents Introduction -- The idea of the heroic -- Eloquent citations -- The confines of habit -- Articulate masks -- The politics of value -- Conclusion Summary 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, cliche, 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 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 Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Notes Online resource; title from web page (Oxford Scholarship Online, viewed May 28, 2020) Subject Beethoven, Ludwig van, 1770-1827 -- Influence Beethoven, Ludwig van, 1770-1827 English literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism American literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism Modernism (Literature) -- Great Britain LITERARY CRITICISM -- European -- English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh. Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.) American literature English literature Literature Modernism (Literature) Great Britain Genre/Form Electronic books Criticism, interpretation, etc. Form Electronic book ISBN 0192548646 9780191858338 0191858331 9780192548641

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