Late Style and its Discontents

Essays in Art, Literature, and Music

Edited by Gordon McMullan and Sam Smiles

Examines the concept of "late style" across the arts
Offers a critique of the idea of late style, as opposed to accepting it as a given
Brings together significant expertise in literature, music, and art history
Questions one of the last remaining unexamined Romantic icons of creativity
Breaks with normative assumptions about the relationship between creativity and death

Late Style and its Discontents

Essays in Art, Literature, and Music

Edited by Gordon McMullan and Sam Smiles

Description

"Late style" is a critical term routinely deployed to characterise the work of selected authors, composers, and creative artists as they enter their last phase of production--often, but not only, in old age. Taken at face value, this terminology merely points to a chronological division in the artist's oeuvre, "late" being the antonym of "early" or the third term in the triad "early-middle-late." However, almost from its inception, the idea of late style or late work has been freighted with aesthetic associations and expectations that promote it as a special episode in the artist's creative life. Late style is often characterized as the imaginative response made by exceptional talents to the imminence of their death. In their confrontation with death creative artists, critics claim, produce work that is by turns a determination to continue while strength remains, a summation of their life's work and a radical vision of the essence of their craft. And because this creative phenomenon is understood as primarily an existential response to a common fate, so late style is understood as something that transcends the particularities of place, time and medium. Critics seeking to understand late work regularly invoke the examples of Titian, Goethe, and Beethoven as exemplars of what constitutes late work, proposing that something unites the late style of authors, composers, and creative artists who otherwise would not be bracketed together and that lateness per se is a special order of creative work.

The essays in this collection resist this position. Ranging across literature, the visual arts, music, and scientific work, the material assembled here looks closely at the material, biographical and other contexts in which the work was produced and seeks both to question the assumptions surrounding late style and to prompt a more critical understanding of the last works of writers, artists and composers.

Late Style and its Discontents

Essays in Art, Literature, and Music

Edited by Gordon McMullan and Sam Smiles

Introduction: Late Style and its Discontents, Gordon McMullan and Sam Smiles
Part one: Lateness, History, Modernity
1. From Titian to Impressionism: The Genealogy of Late Style, Sam Smiles
2. The 'Strangeness' of George Oppen: Criticism, Modernity, and the Conditions of Late Style, Gordon McMullan
Part two: Lateness and the Life Course
3. Historicizing Late Style as a Discourse of Reception, Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon
4. Making Darwin Late: Later Life and Style in Evolutionary Writing and its Contexts, David Amigoni
5. In the Antechamber of Death: Picasso's Later Paintings, Jeremy Lewison
6. The 'Late Styles' of Gioachino Rossini, Philip Gossett
7. Saving Schubert: the Evasions of Late Style, Laura Tunbridge
8. Perceptions of Lateness: Goethe, Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, and D. H. Lawrence, Michael Bell
Part four: The Time and Place of Lateness
10. Suffering Sea-changes: Jane Austen's Afterlives and the Possibilities of a Late Style, Olivia Murphy
11. Ravel, Timeliness, and Late Style, Barbara L. Kelly
12. 'Anachronism': Michael Hamburger and the Time and Place of Late Work, Karen Leeder
Part five: Adorno, Lateness, History
13. Notes on Beethoven's Late Style, Michael Spitzer
14. The Infinity of Water Lilies: On Monet's Late Paintings, Bente Larsen
15. Lateness and Modernity in Theodor Adorno, Robert Spencer
Afterword, Ben Hutchinson

Late Style and its Discontents

Essays in Art, Literature, and Music

Edited by Gordon McMullan and Sam Smiles

Author Information

Gordon McMullan is Professor of English at King's College London and Director of the London Shakespeare Center. He is a critic and an editor with a focus on Shakespeare and early modern drama. He is a general editor of the Arden Early Modern Drama series and author of Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing: Authorship in the Proximity of Death.

Sam Smiles is an art historian at the University of Exeter. His research is focused primarily on British art and especially on the career of JMW Turner. He is curating a major exhibition at Tate Britain on Turner's last works and completing a book on the same subject.

Contributors:

Gordon McMullan and Sam Smiles
Sam Smiles
Gordon McMullan
Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon
David Amigoni
Jeremy Lewison
Philip Gossett
Laura Tunbridge
Michael Bell
Olivia Murphy
Barbara L. Kelly
Karen Leeder
Michael Spitzer
Bente Larsen
Robert Spencer
Ben Hutchinson

Late Style and its Discontents

Essays in Art, Literature, and Music

Edited by Gordon McMullan and Sam Smiles

Reviews and Awards

"This interdiscplinary collection of essays contains contributions from scholars in the areas of literature, philosophy, medicine, art history, and music who deconstruct the 'idea that the work of the last few years of truly great creative artists is marked by a profound change of style, tone, and content,' a narrative that tends to be both backward-looking and prescient of future developments in their artistic fields." --The Beethoven Journal