Late style and its discontents : essays in art, literature, and music / edited by Gordon McMullan and Sam Smiles.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

McMullan, Gordon, 1962- editor.

Smiles, Sam, editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.)--Congresses.

Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.).

Arts--Congresses.

Arts.

Genre:

Conference papers and proceedings.

Physical Description:

xiii, 270 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : color illustrations, music ; 24 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2016.

Summary:

Late style' is a critical term routinely deployed to characterise the work of selected authors, composers, and creative artists as they enter their last phase of production-often, but not only, in old age. Taken at face value, this terminology merely points to a chronological division in the artist's oeuvre, 'late' being the antonym of 'early' or the third term in the triad 'early-middle-late'. However, almost from its inception, the idea of late style or late work has been freighted with aesthetic associations and expectations that promote it as a special episode in the artist's creative life. Late style is often characterised as the imaginative response made by exceptional talents to the imminence of their death. In their confrontation with death creative artists, critics claim, produce work that is by turns a determination to continue while strength remains, a summation of their life's work and a radical vision of the essence of their craft. And because this creative phenomenon is understood as primarily an existential response to a common fate, so late style is understood as something that transcends the particularities of place, time and medium.

Contents:

From Titian to Impressionism: the genealogy of late style / Sam Smiles

The 'strangeness' of George Oppen: criticism, modernity, and the conditions of late style / Gordon McMullan

Historicizing late style as a discourse of reception / Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon

Making Darwin late: later life and style in evolutionary writing and its contexts / David Amigoni

In the antechamber of death: Picasso's later paintings / Jeremy Lewison

The 'late styles' of Gioachino Rossini / Philip Gossett

Saving Schubert: the evasions of late style / Laura Tunbridge

Perceptions of lateness: Goethe, Nietzsche, Thomas Mann and D.H. Lawrence / Michael Bell

Suffering sea changes: Jane Austen's afterlives and the possibilities of a late style / Olivia Murphy

Ravel's timeliness and his many late styles / Barbara L. Kelly

'Anachronism': Michael Hamburger and the time and place of late work / Karen Leeder

Notes of Beethoven's late style / Michael Spitzer

the infinity of water lilies: on Monet's late paintings / Bente Larsen

Lateness and modernity in Theodor Adorno / Robert Spencer

Afterword / Ben Hutchinson.

Notes:

"We ran two conferences entitled 'Rethinking Late Style: Art, Literature, Music, Film' the first at King's College London in November 2007, the second at the Australian National University, Canberra, in August 2008, under the auspices of the Humanities Research Centre (HRC) at Old Canberra House, events at which some the essays that appear in this collection were first aired"--Acknowledgements.

Includes bibliographical references (pages [241]-258) and index.

ISBN:

9780198704621

0198704623

OCLC:

921522783