Books by Marshall Brown

Combining a new genealogy for the gothic novel with original research into gothic contexts in German idealist thought and romantic psychology, The Gothic Text offers lively readings of British and Continental novels pointing back toward the Enlightenment and ahead toward Freud.

Turning Points demonstrates the role of style and form in promoting and shaping cultural development by studying important critics, and analyzing cultural change in literature, music, art, and philosophy.

This volume seeks the common ground of British literature from 1740 to 1798 not in the foreshadowing of Romanticism but in incomplete discoveries and in impediments to expression that Romanticism was to lift.

Why do we need to divide time into periods, and how do these divisions of time contribute to or impede our understanding? Unlike other studies of periodization that limit discussions to whether particular period definitions are true and accurate, Periodization delves into our wariness of such categorizing and the impulse to categorize historical time in the first place.This special issue of MLQ covers examples of periodization from the early modern to the present, including a range from the individual year to the longue durée and incorporates a variety of methods from close empirical study to global concern. In the lead essay, Russell A. Berman argues that periodization saves us from the dangers of both anachronism and presentism. Srinivas Aravamudan, updating Vico, reminds usthat we lose the past if we simply leave it unexamined. In “Perioddity” Timothy J. Reiss reflects on the crossings of chronology with geology in long-range and global perspectives. This collection strives to turn discomfort with periodization into a constructive discourse.Contributors. Srinivas Aravamudan, Russell Berman, Marshall Brown, Margreta de Grazia, Robert J. Griffin, Anne K. Mellor, Michael North, Timothy J. Reiss

The Tooth that Nibbles at the Soul brings together Marshall Browns new and previously published writings on literature and music. These essays engage questions that are central to the development of literature, music, and the arts in the period from Romanticism at the end of the eighteenth century to the avant-garde movements of the early twentieth, a period in which the modern evolution of the arts is coupled with a rise in the significance of music as artistic form.With a special focus on lyric poetry and canonical composers including Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, and Schubert, Brown ties the growing prominence of music in this period to the modernist principle of abstraction. Music, as Brown provocatively notes, conveys meaning without explicitly saying anything. This principle of abstraction could be taken as the overriding formula for modernist art in general; and it explains why in this period music becomes the model to which all the other arts, in particular painting and literature, aspire.Browns title, taken from a poem by Emily Dickinson, reminds us that abstraction -- musical and artistic is anything but toothless; indeed, it nibbles at the soul in subtle and enduring ways. Throughout his wide-ranging and erudite analysis, Browns goal is to pinpoint the nature of musics bite and to illuminate the shared elements of literature and music.While there are many previous comparisons of music and poetry, few are systematic or based on a solid knowledge of both literary criticism and musicology. Browns essays can be enjoyed by a general, well-read public not trained in either music or eighteenth-century literature, as well as by an audience steeped in sophisticated (if not technical) musical analysis.