This chapter traces the sound of the Gothic across Schubert’s piano music. Its features are suggested through funereal imagery, doubles and distortions, yet their tangibility slips out of reach as soon as words come into the picture. The analysis confronts this paradox in pieces ranging from Schubert’s Grande marche funèbre in C Minor, D859, to his Fantasy in F Minor, D940, both for piano four hands, without reducing their depictions of death to a singular conception. It interprets these pieces vis-à-vis Gothic tropes in literature and the virtual arts, among them ghostliness and ambivalence, while allowing meanings to emerge in the gaps between presence and absence, sound and silence. In doing so, the chapter not only reassesses the associations of death in Schubert’s music, but offers ways of contextualising his artistic approach more generally. The Gothic is conjured, problematised, reimagined, yet in the end left to percolate within and beyond the nineteenth-century artistic imagination.

Chapter 1 argues that V. S. Naipaul’s works are critically co-extensive with world literary formations and demonstrably foundational to the conception of the modern idea of world literature. Naipaul’s entry into world literature is via a writing that reads the literary world as an aesthetic totality. Kant’s critique of judgement is critical here even if Naipaul departs from Kant who read human cognition as discursive and not intuitive. Naipaul’s aesthetics is grounded in an intuitive mode of human cognition. His idea of “seeing” (and here he means “critical seeing”) via a “sensible intuition” is the basis of all his writings. Naipaul’s declaration of the primacy of the intuitive intellect – Proust is cited as exemplary – in the artistic process has no need for concepts or guiding principles, a prior idea or even a politics. However, Naipaul heeds Kant’s warning that if we were to rely purely on intuition – which would generate a non-contingent world with no distinction between objects that are real and those merely possible because all objects for the intuitive intellect are real – there would be no universal concepts generated by understanding and only individual representations grasped directly and immediately.

This contests Norbert Eliass view of the civilizing process. It argues that in the first decades of the eighteenth century, the promotion of gentler manners worked in the service of military aggression. Martial virtue was promoted against the threat of effeminacy and corruption, while poets celebrated the humanity of brutal victors in contemporary wars. The Fast and Thanksgiving services of the Church sancitifed the violence of the war zone while discouraging brutality in daily life. Fears about the corrupting influence of war news were countered by ideal models of martial virtue. A new theory of the sublime was developed, which claimed that an imaginative engagement with representations of violence could have a humanizing effect.

Mozart’s use of multiple musical forms and styles differentiates Die Zauberflöte from his previous works. Schikaneder’s audience expected a mixture of comedy and fine singing, added to which higher styles – ritual fanfares, hymns, and “learned” counterpoint – are presaged in the overture. The opera’s conclusion in which light banishes darkness is mirrored throughout – deceptively in the opening scene. The deployment of keys suggests less a system than choices made to suit a desired orchestration or a singer’s tessitura. The forms of arias reflect the status and emotions of each character. The finales differ from opera buffa in requiring scene-changes, reflected in musical styles including recitative, a strange march for the final trials of Pamina and Tamino, and a new tone and form for Papageno’s near-tragedy. The genii who intervene at critical points epitomize a mode peculiar to this opera, the comical sublime; the mixture of styles contributes to the opera’s strengths.

As Darwin recollects and writes his experience of teeming variety in the Brazilian rainforest, he conflates the roles of descrying natural historian and person of aesthetic sensibility. Thinking and feeling under the influence of eighteenth-century theories of the sublime and beautiful, Darwin writes his way into a dynamic that confounds object and subject and destabilizes the chronology of looking. Beginning with Darwin’s pretheoretical working through of the temporality of aesthetic experience, particularly the aesthetic experience of variety, this chapter illuminates the ways that Darwin’s theorization of variation, as a scene of distributed agency, was entangled with the processes of experiencing, reading and writing about variety—and impacted by the anticipation and reality of being read. The temporality of this multifaceted experience anticipates Darwin’s later conclusions about the place of anticipation itself in evolutionary processes that hinge on aesthetic phenomenology.

This chapter explores the influence of British Romanticism – its emphasis on the splendors of nature, the wonder of the sublime, the rehabilitation of outcasts, and, above all, the lure of revolutionary change – on Carl Sandburg’s 1916 collection, Chicago Poems. The chapter concludes that Chicago Poems, a book many associate with the advent of modernism, looks instead like the vestiges of Romanticism.

The idea that the universe is infinite in size is central to the Epicurean system. Infinity, however, is also a concept that, in the history of philosophical, scientific and artistic discussion before and after Lucretius, has defied explanation, engendered paradox, and stimulated the romantic sensibility. This chapter looks at the strategies, philosophical and literary, deployed by Lucretius to achieve closure on this inherently open topic. Co-ordinate with the relationships of analogy and complementarity between the text of the DRN and the nature of the universe it describes, the poem’s poetics of closure and enclosure, on the one hand, and of non-closure or ‘false closure’, on the other, express and enact the infinity of the universe conceived both as all-encompassing and as open-ended. These rival conceptions of infinity are modeled throughout the poem, and especially in Epicurus’ triumph of the mind (1.62–79) and Lucretius’ reworking of a thought-experiment attributed to Archytas of Tarentum (1.951–83). Taken together, they bring out the tension, or complementarity, in Lucretius between the totalizing scientist who prescribes an intellectual panacea and the sublime poet who reaches into the beyond.