Modernism, Music and the Politics of Aesthetics

by Gemma Moss

Overview

Using an approach to music informed by T. W. Adorno, this book examines the real-world, political significance of seemingly abstracted things like musical and literary forms. Re-assessing music in James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Sylvia Townsend Warner, this book re-shapes temporal, aesthetic and political understandings of modernism, by arguing that music plays a crucial role in ongoing attempts to investigate language, rational thought and ideology using aesthetic forms.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781474429917
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	02/06/2023
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x (d)

About the Author

Gemma Moss is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Birmingham City University. She has published on music in Ford Madox Ford, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, and is editor of E. M. Forster’s first novel Where Angels Fear to Tread for the Cambridge Edition of the Fiction of E. M. Forster, which is due for publication in 2024.

Table of Contents

AcknowledgementsPermissionsList of Abbreviations and Editions Used in the TextList of FiguresPrefaceIntroduction

1. On music and modernism: philosophies, histories, approaches 2. James Joyce, Ulysses and the politics of musical form3. Ezra Pound, music and fascism: towards Canto 754. Sylvia Townsend Warner, ideology and Marxist aesthetics5. Music and twenty-first century modernism

BibliographyIndex

Editorial Reviews

Taking up longstanding debates on the politics of modernist aesthetics, Gemma Moss frames her lines of inquiry brilliantly through Adorno.　 Her understanding of music is crucial to her breakthrough understandings.　 This is a book that will make a significant difference in our reading and listening to modernism at work in the world.

Vincent Sherry