Music and Literary Aesthetics in France 1861-1922

The belief that musicians and music were equal, both artistically and socially, with writers and literature, first emerged in German philosophy in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Here Mary Breatnach focuses on the place of music in the aesthetics of Baudelaire, Mallarm and Proust, examining a hitherto unexplored link between these writers' musical interests and their articulation of new and highly personal concepts of art and literature. The book demonstrates that the quest for modernity that underpinned each individual's output, as well as the concomitant questioning of the nature and function of the art of writing, is closely linked to an original vision of the relationship between the written word and music. Breatnach goes on to demonstrate that this vision evolved dialectically between 1861, when Baudelaire published an essay entitled 'Richard Wagner et Tannhuser Paris' and 1922, the year of Proust's death. It is an awareness and understanding of this aspect of the history of French literary aesthetics that affords invaluable insights into the revolutionary nature of an approach to writing that is essentially interdisciplinary. Wagner's impact on literary aesthetics in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century France - an impact that continued to inform concepts of literature in France throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth - is a major focus of attention throughout.