Resounding The Sublime

What does the sublime sound like? Miranda Stanyon traces competing varieties of the sublime, a crucial modern aesthetic category, as shaped by the antagonistic intimacies between music and language. In resounding the history of the sublime over the course of the long eighteenth century, she finds a phenomenon always already resonant.

What does the sublime sound like? Harmonious, discordant, noisy, rustling, silent? Miranda Eva Stanyon rereads and resounds this crucial aesthetic category in English and German literatures of the long eighteenth century from a musical perspective and shows how sonorous sublimes lay at the heart of a central and transformative discourse. For Enlightenment and Romantic era listeners, the musical sublime represented a sonic encounter of the most extreme kind, one that tested what humans were capable of feeling, imagining, thinking, and therefore becoming. The sublime and music have not always sung from the same hymn sheet, Stanyon observes. She charts an antagonistic intimacy between the two, from the sublime's rise to prominence in the later seventeenth century, through the upheavals associated with Kant in the late eighteenth century, and their reverberations in the nineteenth. Offering readings of canonical texts by Longinus, Dryden, Burke, Klopstock, Herder, Coleridge, De Quincey, and others alongside lesser-known figures, she shows how the literary sublime was inextricable from musical culture, from folksongs and ballads to psalmody, polychoral sacred music, and opera. Deeply interdisciplinary, Resounding the Sublime draws literature into dialogue with sound studies, musicology, and intellectual and cultural history to offer new perspectives on the sublime as a phenomenon which crossed media, disciplines, and cultures. An interdisciplinary study of sound in history, the book recovers varieties of the sublime crucial for understanding both the period it covers and the genealogy of modern and postmodern aesthetic discourses. In resounding the sublime, Stanyon reveals a phenomenon which was always already resonant. The sublime emerges not only as the aesthetic of the violently powerful, a-rational, or unrepresentable, but as a variegated discourse with competing dissonant, harmonious, rustling, noisy, and silent strains, one in which music and sound illustrate deep divisions over issues of power, reason, and representation.

The first English language collection on the musical sublime. Reveals music's place at the forefront of this interdisciplinary aesthetic category.

This is the only collection of its kind to focus on one of the most important aspects of the cultural history of the Romantic period, its sources, and its afterlives. Multidisciplinary in approach, the volume examines the variety of areas of enquiry and genres of cultural productivity in which the sublime played a substantial role during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. With impressive international scope, this Companion considers the Romantic sublime in both European and American contexts and features essays by leading scholars from a range of national backgrounds and subject specialisms, including state-of-the-art perspectives in digital and environmental humanities. An accessible, wide-ranging, and thorough introduction, aimed at researchers, students, and general readers alike, and including extensive suggestions for further reading, The Cambridge Companion to the Romantic Sublime is the go-to book on the subject.

This unparalleled exploration reveals how understandings of sound shifted and multiplied in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. Drawing on literary studies, musicology and history, and interrogating how writers of this period thought with and through sound, this book opens up a new chapter in the history of the senses.

A fate impregnated of unspoken prophecies, a phenomenal tour de force - to properly speak - a tour de force commanding a favorable manipulation of the things of life has brought together what nature has created to live in harmony and that all egocentric human conventions tend to shamelessly set apart through racial pretexts and irrelevant schemes. On a propitious stage - laid by Providence, supreme architect, unforeseeable genie of organization, as by enchantment, as by an imperious necessity, as if nature wanted to impose its supreme will in the intimacy of human affairs - are joined two destinies dressed for the conquest, the mastery and the triumph of life's noblest sentiments. In an exceptional situation arranged by a circumstance of the most unaccustomed came to life one of the most striking episodes of life sagacious occurrences promoter of those sentiments that are said to be too beautiful to be true. Two human entities joined wisdom, patience and stubbornness to ensure the triumph of the most powerful because the truest and the purest sentiments of life. Gustave Brun - a man of color from humble social and economic background - has become the archetype of intellectual success, possessor of solid almost autodidactic Academic formation. Having walked his way with small but firm steps up to the zone where elitist intellectualism finds its more explicit definition, he silently nourished a male desire to succeed instilled in him by the harsh existence he has survived. A huge, quiet, logic and understandable ambition -"a vaulting ambition which overleaps itself," would say William Shakespeare - stayed the beacon that has led every single one of his short but constant strides in the long but fruitful crusade for the fulfillment of his manly aspirations. Holder of undeniable credentials, he transcended to deserve a Professorial chair of Cultural Anthropology in one of the most prestigious establishments of Education on earth, as it occurs Princeton University. Yet, he still felt short on his success, which he acknowledged, unfinished until he would have the opportunity to add to his intellectual accomplishment what he would eventually consider as the most important acquisition of his lifetime: love, true love, the one that crowns all human longings. Her Assistant secretly hung his heart high on the frontispiece of love, and - as he is going to admit it later - since day one, since his hungry eyes, thirsty of romantic complicity were posed on her adorable silhouette. Celine Lakadus, young female Caucasian, bearer of a proverbial sweetness in the neighborhood of culture, innate sweetness inside-outly expressed and inherited from the Latin background of her Romanian father, heiress of a colossal otherwise extravagant fortune and possessor of what can ensure high life standards in uppercase characters. At the paroxysm of her womanly dreams, armed with a solid cultural formation, her quest for happiness came to an unexpected height when fate has placed on her way at the right time the unexpected and the inevitable. Her who felt before like abandoned on the endless boulevard of ecstasy - by fault of her own demanding character when it comes to sentimental questions - as a flower condemned to wither at the next dry season suddenly learned to dream. Gustave Brun, her former mentor, stole her heart. She has learned - aided by her natural perspicacity to weigh details and to discover the truth of all things. During the course of several months of frank camaraderie although limited to intellectual exchange of ideas, she has arrived to the self-persuasion plateau and assessed him as being the man she's been expecting for so long. Why, would ask the stupefied, petrified spectator? "Reasons of the heart that reason ignores", she would argue. For both, it's the renaissance of life in its entire splendor. A life that appeared for both senseless in its essence where any materialistic accomplishment that it is eco

A stimulating new approach to understanding the relationship between music and culture in the long nineteenth century.

In this volume authors working across different disciplines of late antique and medieval thought explore the reception of Platonic and Neoplatonic tenets among Christians, Jews, and Muslims.