This chapter focuses on examples of Henry James’s post-1890 writings – including Notes of a Son and Brother (1914), the Prefaces to the New York Edition (1907–9), and ‘Maud-Evelyn’ (1900) – which engage with, or themselves embody, the challenge of commemorating lives cut short prematurely or traumatically. The first half addresses formal and stylistic features and explores how James’s commitment to conserving and commemorating the unspent experiential potential of the dead of the American Civil War manifests within his late aesthetics: informing syntax, notions of character, and the pressure placed on traditional narrative structures. The subsequent sections then trace a competing phenomenon, inspired in part by the author’s meditations on Civil War Monuments: the concern that several of James’s late works (both fictional and non-fictional) display about the wisdom of investing emotionally in the unlived lives of the untimely dead. Together, these sections argue that, during the last twenty-five years of his life, James produced writings at once enthralled by and wary of unfulfilled narrative potential, and attentive to how it might be used to bind epochs together.

This chapter examines Kerouac’s later novels such as Big Sur, Satori in Paris, Desolation Angels, and Vanity of Duluoz, showing how he developed a “late style” that was a response to the way his image and writing were commodified by popular and literary culture. These late novels portray the author-narrator as out of step with a culture that has passed him by, as Kerouac suggests the ways his fame as the so-called “King of the Beatniks” led to both his increasing alcoholism, and to new ways of looking at himself in his writing.

This essay summarises the working relationship between composer Benjamin Britten (1913–76) and writer William Plomer (1903–73). After listing their completed collaborations – Gloriana (1953), Curlew River (1964), The Burning Fiery Furnace (1966), The Prodigal Son (1968) – and abandoned projects, the essay turns to broader points of comparison and particularly to Britten and Plomer’s shared sense of ‘exile’, which the author argues informs their independent and collaborative work. Plomer’s shift away from the novel as a genre parallels Britten’s away from full-length opera. Their choice of subject, particularly in their work together, shows a movement away from realism. They cultivate a sense of humour marked by irony, and they increasingly pursue an economy of artistic material. These shared traits may point to the artists’ sense of ‘estrangement’ and may also be indicators of ‘late style’.

A lack of self-recognition may point to psychological disorder and self-estrangement, and this chapter tackles the problematic notions of late style and madness in Schumann’s oeuvre. Still, misrecognition, mishearing, and their resulting subjective estrangement is wound throughout Schumann’s oeuvre, from the close of the Op. 35 Kerner cycle and the enigmatic piano miniature ‘Vogel als Prophet’ to the magical mirror scene from Genoveva; in extreme form it is manifested in the depiction of madness in the Andersen setting ‘Der Spielmann’. Most troublingly, the loss of musical self-recognition is epitomised autobiographically in the theme of the late Geistervariationen, with its reworking of an idea found in the slow movement of the Violin Concerto, but one which Schumann misattributed to the spirits of Schubert and Mendelssohn. Yet as I argue at the chapter’s close, the psychological state of the music’s virtual subjects often bear scant relation to anything that can be shown to apply to the actual biographical subject, Robert Schumann. In recognising signs of insanity in Schumann’s music, commentators are often only reading their own presuppositions into it.

In his review of Our Mutual Friend (1864–5), Henry James claimed the novel showed signs of its author’s ‘exhaustion’. In this chapter, Garrett Stewart shows, by way of contrast and rebuttal, the exhaustive catalogue of stylistic effects that Dickens energetically employs in his last complete novel. The chapter individuates distinct features of style from Dickens’s long-standing repertoire – including the dextrous use of adjectives and negatives, ingenuity of syntax and inversion, sound and word play, renovation of idiom and cliché – to show Dickens flaunting and holding up to inspection his own characteristic verbal and phrasal habits.

Nicola Bradbury’s chapter on Henry James notices the force that comes from simple diction even as it expresses subtle, complicated thoughts, feelings and occasions in The Wings of the Dove (1902) and What Maisie Knew (1897). At times in these novels, a bold, clear style plays against the more verbose, analytical style we expect from late James. A style such as this repeatedly gestures towards an apprehension that is not fully expressed, something that goes behind and beyond the immediate statement. Here, style is measured at the level of the sentence and it is shown to comprise of a range of devices including alliteration, assonance, diction, syntax, rhythm, and cadence.

Scholars of French music have long known the name Vladimir Jankélévitch, but it is only in recent years that he has captured the attention of musicologists more generally. This is due almost entirely to the efforts of Carolyn Abbate, whose much-debated 2004 essay “Music – Drastic or Gnostic?” gives Jankélévitch pride of place.1 A year before that essay, Abbate had published a translation of Jankélévitch’s 1961 book Music and the Ineffable, which was the focus of a special session at the 2010 annual meeting of the American Musicological Society and a subsequent colloquy in the Journal of the American Musicological Society.

This chapter discusses the concept of ‘late style’, as defined by Edward Said in his last book, in the work of recent and contemporary Irish poets Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney, and Paul Muldoon. It explores the anachronistic and untimely as productive ways of thinking about the critical function of art in the three poets, who are all preoccupied with what means to have come ‘too late’ to history, and to poetry. The essay explores the extent to which ‘late style’ can be understood as a function of the ‘exiled’ relationship between the artist and his audience, and to what extent it is a historical consequence of late modernity.

Political, social, technical, and cultural changes formed the context when Strauss composed a large part of his Lieder oeuvre between 1887 and 1906. The Liederabend had been established as a new concert format in the 1870s, shifting the genre’s performance environment from the private salon to the public stage, a development not without consequences for the genre itself. Strauss developed a personal style that clearly distinguished him from contemporaries such as Hugo Wolf, Gustav Mahler, or Max Reger. Seemingly untouched by the changes of his time at first glance, Strauss nevertheless reflected current affairs in some of his Lieder. This is true in particular for the year 1918, the last year of World War I, when Strauss took up composing Lieder after a twelve-year hiatus. When the aged composer later reflected upon his role in his construction of musical and cultural history, the Lied played a significant part within this process of self-affirmation.

Historically informed analysis reveals a very different conception of hero in the Eroica than the one sustained in the popular imagination and perpetuated by the majority of its reception history: a militaristic or Napoleonic Heldenleben. By combining analytic perspectives from schema theory and topic theory with key passages from Beethoven’s epistolary life and Tagebuch, this chapter illustrates that the Eroica’s narrative is akin to religious drama, conveying the same theme of abnegation found in the contemporary oratorio Christus am Ölberge and the Heiligenstadt Testament, the Eroica’s ‘literary prototype’. Unlike some middle-period works which communicate a ‘tragic-to-triumphant’ expressive genre, the Eroica is cast in the ‘tragic-to-transcendent’ type, which became characteristic of Beethoven’s late style. A central component of this spiritual genre is the strategic positioning of structural and semantic oppositions in an unresolved state of suspension. The Eroica manifests this most overtly through a governing opposition between death ‘ombra’ and pastoral ‘Ländler, contredanse’ music, and the association of this stylistic opposition with the tonalities of G minor and E flat major, respectively. Rather than a programmatic narrative about a hero who overcomes, the Eroica is a conceptually ‘late’ work that meditates on suffering as a spiritual necessity and its implications for transcendence.