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Modernism, Music and the Politics of Aesthetics

Why was music so prominent in modernist literature? Why did so many modernist writers turn to an abstract art form like music to help them explore politics, gender, war, capitalism, technology and the social functions of art? 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 on-going attempts to investigate language, rational thought and ideology using aesthetic forms. Finally, through an analysis of twenty-first-century novelists who have returned to modernist music and methods of formal innovation, this book argues that we need a new account of modernism, which is still being produced today. Since contemporary writers continue to ask what can be achieved by combining musical and literary forms, and to debate the value of linguistic and rational meaning against music’s non-referential, emotive communicative capacities, this book provides a methodology that offers a purchase on matters we have not yet found our way out of.