Music and the Irish Literary Imagination

ISBN-13: 9780199547326 / Angielski / Twarda / 2009 / 288 str.

Harry White

Opis

Harry White examines the influence of music in the development of the Irish literary imagination from 1800 to the present day. He identifies music as a preoccupation which originated in the poetry of Thomas Moore early in the nineteenth century. He argues that this preoccupation decisively influenced Moore's attempt to translate the 'meaning' of Irish music into verse, and that it also informed Moore's considerable impact on the development of European musical romanticism, as in the music of Berlioz and Schumann. White then examines how this preoccupation was later recovered by W.B. Yeats, whose poetry is imbued with music as a rival presence to language. In its readings of Yeats, Synge, Shaw and Joyce, the book argues that this striking musical awareness had a profound influence on the Irish literary imagination, to the extent that poetry, fiction and drama could function as correlatives of musical genres. Although Yeats insisted on the synonymous condition of speech and song in his poetry, Synge, Shaw and Joyce explicitly identified opera in particular as a generic prototype for their own work. Synge's formal musical training and early inclinations as a composer, Shaw's perception of himself as the natural successor to Wagner, and Joyce's no less striking absorption of a host of musical techniques in his fiction are advanced in this study as formative (rather than incidental) elements in the development of modern Irish writing.
Music and the Irish Literary Imagination also considers Beckett's emancipation from the oppressive condition of words in general (and Joyce in particular) through the agency of music, and argues that the strong presence of Mendelssohn, Chopin and Janacek in the works of Brian Friel is correspondingly essential to Friel's dramatization of Irish experience in the aftermath of Beckett. The book closes with a reading of Seamus Heaney, in which the poet's own preoccupation with the currency of established literary forms is enlisted to illuminate Heaney's abiding sense of poetry as music.

Recenzje

a timely and important addition to this field and one that, in its focus, inverts this one-way direction of influence between literature and music. ...Harry White's carefully wroght written style compels one to read slowly and savour the mean of the expression as well as the argument. And it is richly rewarding to do so. This is a highly significant study that not only adds greatly to our understanding of the twentieth-century Irish literature canon but also raises important questions about the role of music in modern(ist) literature more generally.

O autorze

Harry White is Professor of Music at University College Dublin and a Fellow of the Royal Irish Academy of Music. From 2003-2006, he was inaugural President of the Society for Musicology in Ireland, and in 2006 he was elected to the Royal Irish Academy. He is general editor (with Gerard Gillen) of the series Irish Musical Studies and (with Barra Boydell) of the forthcoming Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland. His previous books include The Keeper's Recital (1998) and The Progress of Music in Ireland (2005).