The language of music: Paradigms of performance in Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Vernon Lee, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf

The dissertation looks at figures and constructs of performance in Victorian and early modernist works in order to examine the complex interrelationship of music and literature in the period. I argue that authors Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Vernon Lee, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf view performance as an alternative strategy for envisioning art and consequently turn to music, the most performance-oriented of all the arts, as an aesthetic and structural model. As a symbolic language that can only be fully realized through performance, music provides a unique paradigm for positing art as process rather than product and elucidating the relationship between the work and its audience/reader.;Drawing on the "Sirens" episode of Ulysses, I investigate the way in which Joyce uses principles of simultaneity and sequence to construct language as music and music as language. Joyce's radical "performance" of the fusion of language and music in "Sirens" underscores his argument that the perception of language, like that of music, requires a synchronization of sight and sound. Finally, I look at Woolf s exploration of music's potential as a binding force for social community in Between the Acts. I argue that Woolf uses strategies of contrapuntal voicing and two different models of musical polyphony to reconcile the individual and the community into an artistic paradigm of wholeness and inclusivity.;I examine the way in which Rossetti employs music in his paintings and poetry to reconcile oppositions of presence/absence and sound/silence and to conflate visual and aural realms of experience. His framing of text and image in terms of music constitutes an artistic response to questions about the temporal, spatial, and material dimensions of art. Using the short story "A Wicked Voice," I demonstrate how Vernon Lee uses music as a medium through which to critique and debunk the aesthetic principles of composer Richard Wagner. Employing Wagner's own signature tools, the leitmotiv and musical transformation, Lee exposes the moral implications of Wagner's intellectual, emotional, and aesthetic control of his audience and posits her own interactive model of art dependent upon the creative collaboration of artist, performer, and audience.