SearchMy accountHelpBasket0 items

Edinburgh Studies in Transatlantic Literatures

Literature and Music in the Atlantic World, 1767-1867

By Catherine Jones

Format

£100.00

In stock

About this book

Winner of the 2014 British Association for American Studies Book Prize

Explores the interaction of literature and music in the Atlantic world in the age of Enlightenment and Romanticism

This new study looks at the relationship of rhetoric and music in the era’s intellectual discourses, texts and performance cultures principally in Europe and North America. Catherine Jones begins by examining the attitudes to music and its performance by leading figures of the American Enlightenment and Revolution, notably Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. She also looks at the attempts of Francis Hopkinson, William Billings and others to harness the Orphean power of music so that it should become a progressive force in the creation of a new society. She argues that the association of rhetoric and music that reaches back to classical Antiquity acquired new relevance and underwent new theorisation and practical application in the American Enlightenment in light of revolutionary Atlantic conditions. Jones goes on to consider changes in the relationship of rhetoric and music in the nationalising milieu of the nineteenth century; the connections of literature, music and music theory to changing models of subjectivity; and Romantic appropriations of Enlightenment visions of the public ethical function of music.

Key Features
  • The first study devoted to literature and music in the Atlantic world
  • Includes detailed examination of works by canonical and lesser known eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American writers and composers
  • Shows the intertwining of European and American cultural forms
  • Integrates the history of music and the history of subjectivity

Reviews

[An] impressive and attractive book.
Literature and Music in the Atlantic World is an ambitious work of synthesis, and a down payment on what we can hope will be further generalizations drawn from Jones’s deep engagement with the modes in which musical experience and aesthetic theory drew sustenance from each other, along with their impact on political life during a period of tremendous change and lively – sometimes overheated – international debate.
This is an assured example of Transatlantic American Studies at its best. Catherine Jones moves with verve and grace between discussions of a wide range of musical genres, the literary, scientific and political discourses of the time, and recent scholarship, constructing an original and engaging narrative. The book will be an invaluable aid to anyone interested in the profound role of music in the shaping of American ideologies during the 18th and 19th centuries.
Table of contents
List of Illustrations; Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. Magic Numbers and Persuasive Sound; 2. Cosmopolitanism and the Nation; 3. The Life in Music; 4. Chants Democratic and Native American; 5. The Musical Sublime; Index
About the author

Catherine Jones

Catherine Jones is a Lecturer in English at the University of Aberdeen. She is the author of Literary Memory: Scott’s Waverley Novels and the Psychology of Narrative (Bucknell University Press, 2003) and the editor, with David Duff, of Scotland, Ireland, and the Romantic Aesthetic (Bucknell University Press, 2007).

More in this series

See the series →