Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Lists of Figures and Music examples
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Approaches to Word–Music Studies of the Long Nineteenth Century
- 1 Losing Sense, Making Music: What Erik Satie's Music and Poetry do for Each Other
- 2 Not Listening in Paris: Critical and Fictional Lapses of Attention at the Opera
- 3 New Expectations: How to Listen to Sonata Form, 1800–1860
- 4 The Science of Musical Memory: Vernon Lee and the Remembrance of Sounds Past
- 5 Musical Listening in The Mysteries of Udolpho
- 6 Katherine Mansfield and Nineteenth-Century Musicality
- 7 E.T.A. Hoffmann beyond the ‘Paradigm shift’: Music and Irony in the Novellas 1815–1819
- 8 Fiction as Musical Critique: Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out and the Case of Wagner
- 9 Théodore de Banville and the Mysteries of Song
- 10 Performing Poetry as Music: How Composers Accept Baudelaire's Invitation to Song
- 11 The Grit in the Oyster, or How to Quarrel with a Poet
- Afterword: Wording Notes: Musical Marginalia in the Guise of an Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Musical Listening in The Mysteries of Udolpho
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Lists of Figures and Music examples
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Approaches to Word–Music Studies of the Long Nineteenth Century
- 1 Losing Sense, Making Music: What Erik Satie's Music and Poetry do for Each Other
- 2 Not Listening in Paris: Critical and Fictional Lapses of Attention at the Opera
- 3 New Expectations: How to Listen to Sonata Form, 1800–1860
- 4 The Science of Musical Memory: Vernon Lee and the Remembrance of Sounds Past
- 5 Musical Listening in The Mysteries of Udolpho
- 6 Katherine Mansfield and Nineteenth-Century Musicality
- 7 E.T.A. Hoffmann beyond the ‘Paradigm shift’: Music and Irony in the Novellas 1815–1819
- 8 Fiction as Musical Critique: Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out and the Case of Wagner
- 9 Théodore de Banville and the Mysteries of Song
- 10 Performing Poetry as Music: How Composers Accept Baudelaire's Invitation to Song
- 11 The Grit in the Oyster, or How to Quarrel with a Poet
- Afterword: Wording Notes: Musical Marginalia in the Guise of an Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Ann Radcliffe rose to prominence during the 1790s, when a string of best-sellers established her as England's most commercially successful writer and as the chief practitioner of the Gothic style. While stock elements such as mouldering castles, rapacious villains and mangled corpses are liberally scattered throughout her works, her demystification of other-worldly elements – known as the ‘explained supernatural’ – and her penchant for creating stunning, phantasmagoric spectacles are typically thought of today as the most notable features of her Gothic signature. However, there is one hallmark of Radcliffe's Gothic that has managed to escape notice: her attention to sound and music. In her novels, characters are musical listeners as well as performers, and they inhabit worlds organized and defined by sound, in which music is much more than the polite diversion found in much late eighteenth-century fiction. Indeed, unlike other novelists from the 1790s, such as Elizabeth Inchbald and William Godwin, who relegated music to the realm of domestic accomplishments, Radcliffe presents music and sound as vital components of her characters' sensory experiences. No other fiction writer from this period assigned music such a significant and diverse role; nor did any other attend so minutely to the practice of describing sounds. For these reasons, Radcliffe deserves to be considered as the first English novelist to develop and sustain a narrative practice of conjuring sonic, musical environments in fiction.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Words and Notes in the Long Nineteenth Century , pp. 85 - 102Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2013