Mallarmé and Debussy

"In this approach to the interdiscipline study of music and poetry, Elizabeth McCombie examines a series of encounters between Mallarme and Debussy, both radical innovators in their respective arts." "In readings of Mallarme's critical prose, the author argues that Mallarme's poetic theory creates an architecture for the cohabitation of music and letters. Placing works by the artists alongside one another in precise readings, McCombie reveals performative structural motifs, analytical tools that can express our experience of the two arts and their middle ground." "The implications of this relational discourse for literary and musical study reach beyond Mallarme and Debussy. The apparatus of figures derived here provides a dynamic instrument of inter-art investigation, a necessary supplement to the individual criticisms of music and poetry, and a powerful new critical vocabulary for illuminating modernism."--Jacket.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.