Books by Peter Dayan

Modern literature has always been obsessed by music. It cannot seem to think about itself without obsessing about music. And music has returned the favour. The Routledge Companion to Music and Modern Literature addresses this relationship as a significant contribution to the burgeoning field of word and music studies.

Why does poetry appeal to music? Can music be said to communicate, as language does? What, between music and poetry, is it possible to translate? The author contends that the reasons for this difficulty were worked out with rigour and consistency in a French literary tradition, which stretches from Sand to Derrida.

In 1877, Ruskin accused Whistler of 'flinging a pot of paint in the public's face'. Was he right? After all, Whistler always denied that the true function of art was to represent anything. This title traces the history of the principle: how it created our very notion of 'great art', and why it declined as a vision from the 1960s.