From Daniel Albright, author of Musicking Shakespeare and Berlioz's Semi-Operas, comes a collection of essays on music and dance, probing the problems of articulating the meaning(s) of music; the lar
From its dissonant musics to its surrealist spectacles (the urinal is a violin!), Modernist art often seems to give more frustration than pleasure to its audience. In Untwisting the Serpent, Daniel Al
How do you rationally connect the diverse literature, music, and painting of an age? Throughout the modernist era—which began roughly in 1872 with the Franco-Prussian War, climaxed with the Great War,
Daniel Albright gathers parables, poems, dreams, translations, written during a three-year period following the death of his father. Together, these form a moving record of a time of trouble, a tri
In this book, Daniel Albright, one of today's most intrepid and vividly communicative explorers of the border territory between literature and music, offers insights into how composers of genius can
Berlioz's Semi-Operas studies two works, Romeo et Juliette and La damnation de Faust, which are among the most challenging of the entire Romantic movement, not least because they assault the notion of
How do you rationally connect the diverse literature, music, and painting of an age? Throughout the modernist era—which began roughly in 1872 with the Franco-Prussian War, climaxed with the Great War,
From its dissonant musics to its surrealist spectacles (the urinal is a violin!), Modernist art often seems to give more frustration than pleasure to its audience. In Untwisting the Serpent, Daniel Al
Beckett and Aesthetics, first published in 2003, examines Samuel Beckett's struggle with the recalcitrance of artistic media, their refusal to yield to his artistic purposes. As a young man Beckett hoped that writing could provide psychic authenticity and true representation of the physical world; instead he found himself immersed in artificialities and self-enclosed word games. Daniel Albright argues that Beckett escaped from this bind through allegories of artistic frustration and through an art of non-representation, estrangement and general failure. He arrived, Albright shows, at some grasp of fact through the most indirect route available. Albright explores Beckett's experimentation with the notion that an artistic medium might itself be made to speak. This powerful and highly original book explores Beckett's own engagement with radio, film, and television, prose and drama as part of an attempt to escape the confines of the aesthetic. Albright's Beckett becomes a sophisticated
Quantum Poetics examines the way modernist poets appropriated scientific metaphors as part of a general search for the pre-verbal origins of poetry. Daniel Albright traces Modernism's search for the elementary particles from which poems were constructed. The poetic possibilities offered by developments in scientific discourse intrigued Yeats, Eliot and Pound, writers intent on remapping the general theory of poetry. Using models supplied by physicists, Yeats sought for the basic units of poetic force, both through his sequence A Vision and through his belief in, and defence of, the purity of symbols. Pound's whole critical vocabulary, Albright claims, aims at drawing art and science together in a search for poetic precision, the tiniest textual particles that held poems together. Through a series of patient and original readings, Quantum Poetics demonstrates how modernists created a whole new way of thinking about poetry and science as two different aspects of the same quest.
While comparative literature is a well-recognized field of study, the notion of comparative arts remains unfamiliar to many. In this fascinating book, Daniel Albright addresses the fundamental questio
If in earlier eras music may have seemed slow to respond to advances in other artistic media, during the modernist age it asserted itself in the vanguard. Modernism and Music provides a rich selection
Great Shakespeareans offers a systematic account of those figures who have had the greatest influence on the interpretation, understanding and cultural reception of Shakespeare, both nationally and in
Great Shakespeareans offers a systematic account of those figures who have had the greatest influence on the interpretation, understanding and cultural reception of Shakespeare, both nationally and in
If in earlier eras music may have seemed slow to respond to advances in other artistic media, during the modernist age it asserted itself in the vanguard. Modernism and Music provides a rich selection
