Mallarmé and Debussy: Unheard Music, Unseen Text (Oxford Modern Languages and Literature Monographs)

This book examines afresh the web of similarities and differences between music and poetry using works by Mallarmé and Debussy as case studies. It challenges the easy metaphorical impressionism that has characterized much of the scholarly literature to date. Analyzing Mallarmé's vision of a shared musico-poetic aesthetic, Elizabeth McCombie derives a set of performative structural motifs, analytical tools that express our experience of the two arts and their middle ground.