Essays on Literature and Music (1985 – 2013) by Walter Bernhart

Book excerpt: This volume is dedicated to the musico-literary oeuvre of Walter Bernhart, professor of English literature at Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz/Austria and pioneer in the field of intermedial relations between literature and other arts and media. It renders accessible a wide variety of texts which are sometimes no longer easily retrievable. The 37 texts collected here in chronological order span the period from 1985 to 2013 and thematically range from contributions to opera programmes and the discussion of musical aspects of Romantic and modernist poetry to inquiries into individual operas and composers as well as into theoretical aspects of word and music relations (e. g. the ways of setting poetry to music, musico-literary ‘comparative poetics’, the concept of ‘genre’ in music and literature, iconicity in both media, their narrative as well as metareferential and illusionist capacities). The volume is of relevance to literary scholars and musicologists but also to all those with an interest in intermediality studies in general and in the relations between literature and music in particular.