The Language of Music: Paradigms of Performance in Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Vernon Lee, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf

The dissertation looks at figures and constructs of performance in Victorian and early modernist works in order to examine the complex interrelationship of music and literature in the period. I argue that authors Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Vernon Lee, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf view performance as an alternative strategy for envisioning art and consequently turn to music, the most performance-oriented of all the arts, as an aesthetic and structural model. As a symbolic language that can only be fully realized through performance, music provides a unique paradigm for positing art as process rather than product and elucidating the relationship between the work and its audience/reader.