Virginia Woolf and classical music : politics, aesthetics, form /
Virginia Woolf & Classical Music
Emma Sutton.
- 1 online resource (ix, 171 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).
Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 02 Oct 2015).
On not writing opera -- Killing the pianist in the house -- Death in effigy -- Fugues, flights and free association -- What it really means to be English -- Only suggest.
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 to classical 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 and gender. 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 with musicians; and the study outlines the relationship between her ‘musicalized’ work and that of contemporaries including Joyce, Lawrence, Forster, Mansfield and Eliot.