Virginia Woolf and Classical Music: Politics, Aesthetics, Form

Virginia Woolf and Classical Music: Politics, Aesthetics, Form
ISBN-10
0748637877
ISBN-13
9780748637874
Category
Literary Criticism
Pages
171
Language
English
Published
2013
Author
Emma Sutton

Description

This study is a groundbreaking investigation into the formative influence of music on Virginia Woolf's writing. In this unique study Emma Sutton discusses all of Woolf's novels as well as selected essays and short fiction, offering detailed commentaries on Woolf's numerous allusions toclassical repertoire and to composers including Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner. Sutton explores Woolf's interest in the contested relationship between politics and music, placing her work in a matrix of ideas about music and national identity, class, anti-Semitism, pacifism, sexuality andgender. The study also considers the formal influence of music - from fugue to Romantic opera - on Woolf's prose and narrative techniques. The analysis of music's role in Woolf's aesthetics and fiction is contextualized in accounts of her musical education, activities as a listener, and friendships withmusicians; and the study outlines the relationship between her 'musicalized' work and that of contemporaries including Joyce, Lawrence, Forster, Mansfield and Eliot.

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