George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

by Correa, Delia Da Sousa

• ISBN13: 9780333997574
• ISBN10: 0333997573
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-02-08
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

George Eliot was passionate about music and her writing is steeped in musical allusion. This book explores musical reference in her work and investigates contexts such as Eliot's friendship with Wagner, the legacy of Romanticism, music's role in scientific theory, and the ambivalent status of female musicality. The book establishes how intensely Eliot's musical allusions are informed by her contemporary culture and offers a fresh view of the experimental writing through which she took literary realism into previously uncharted regions.

Author Biography

Delia Da Sousa Correa is in the Literature Department at the Open University.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	viii
Acknowledgements	ix
Introduction: `Concords and Discords, Cadences and Cries'	1	(10)
Music, Science, Literature: The `Large Music of Reasonable Speech'	11	(48)
The origin and function of music	12	(19)
The scientific debate	31	(14)
`Liszt, Wagner, and Weimar'	45	(7)
Musical literary criticism	52	(7)
Music and the Woman Question: The `Minister of Domestic Concord' and `the Most Sensuous of Accomplishments'	59	(43)
Music and female education	61	(5)
The `minister of domestic concord'	66	(11)
The `most sensuous of accomplishments'	77	(14)
Music and the woman writer	91	(11)
The Mill on the Floss: `A Mind Susceptible to Music'	102	(28)
The `laws of attraction'	110	(8)
Music and memory	118	(8)
Tragedy and hyperbole	126	(4)
Daniel Deronda: `The Other Side of Silence'	130	(62)
Musical vocation and literary opera	131	(14)
Female vocation	145	(24)
Racial vocation	169	(8)
Musical sympathies: `meeting streams'	177	(15)
Conclusion	192	(3)
Notes	195	(41)
Bibliography	236	(13)
Index	249