Books in the Oxford Modern Language and Literature Monographs series

To explore literary silence is to explore the relationships between literary texts and the silence of the ineffable. Philosophical and critical accounts tend to operate with a dualistic understanding of silence as the negative other of text. This study, however, seeks to place silence within the literary text.

Examines the web of similarities and differences between music and poetry using works by Mallarme and Debussy as case studies. Analysing Mallarme's vision of a shared musico-poetic aesthetic, this book derives a set of performative structural motifs, analytical tools that express our experience of the two arts and their middle ground.