Weird Music: Reading John Ireland and Arthur Machen - Hardcover

by Eric McElroy (Author)

Using John Ireland's fascination with Arthur Machen as case study, this book challenges our perception of the correspondence between music and literature in twentieth-century Britain.
The composer John Ireland (1879-1962) declared repeatedly that no one could understand his music until they had first read the work of his favourite writer, Arthur Machen (1863-1947). This book is the first study to take Ireland at his word. Revolving around Machen's classification as a founding figure of 'weird fiction', it uses weird aesthetics as an interpretative lens with which to understand Ireland's notoriously cryptic life and music. Its four chapters deal respectively with Machen's and Ireland's parallel experience of fin-de-siècle London; with their engagement with the English pastoral tradition; with their explorations of weird art's relationship with eroticism; and with unsettling implications of alternative historiography.