Chapter 5, Rock and Romanticism, Palgrave Macmillan

Chapter 5 of Rock and Romanticism: Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms: “A Northern ‘Ode on Melancholy’?—The Music of Joy Division” (pp. 83-100) by Caroline Langhorst, Ph.D Candidate, University of Mainz.

• Chapter summary
  • Further complicating sexual identity, the female, and the Gothic is Caroline Langhorst’s “A Northern ‘Ode on Melancholy’?—The Music of Joy Division.” Her essay inverts the legacy of female Gothic by shifting its focus to the death of a beautiful man. It engages Joy Division’s Ian Curtis as a Romantic figure who follows the Gothic pattern of the dead, young artist, a familiar pattern established by Keats, Shelley, and Byron. Identifying industrial Manchester as the context for Joy Division’s music, Langhorst finds in it the sense of alienation and isolation Löwy and Sayre describe as the inevitable outcome of the industrialized subject. Byron and Keats are especially important as predecessors of Ian Curtis. Curtis, Byron, and Keats share in common a cult of personality inextricably bound up with their early deaths which, afterwards, came to define the reception of these artists’ creative production. Parallels with Keats are also extended to an emphasis on the necessity of suffering.
• Music
  • Joy Division
    • “Atmosphere”
    • “Atrocity Exhibition”
    • “Heart and Soul”
    • “New Dawn Fades”
    • “Dead Souls”
    • “Disorder”
    • “Insight”
    • “Decades”
    • “Love Will Tear Us Apart”
    • “Shadowplay”
    • “Atrocity Exhibition”
    • “Day of the Lords”
    • “She’s Lost Control”
    • “Passover”
    • “Twenty-Four Hours”
  • Antmusic, “Deutscher Girls”
  • Joy Division, “I Remember Nothing”
• Literature (many passing references excluded)
  • Byron
    • “The Giaour”
    • “When We Two Parted“
  • John Keats
    • “Sonnet to Chatterton“
    • Lamia
    • Hyperion
    • “Ode to a Nightingale”
    • “Ode on Melancholy”
  • Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England
  • Elizabeth Gaskell
    • Mary Barton
    • North and South
  • George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier
  • Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog
  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Monody on the Death of Chatterton“
  • Alfred de Vigny, Chatterton
  • Ruggero Leoncavallo, Chatterton (opera)
  • Henry Wallis, The Death of Chatterton
  • Percy Shelley
    • Adonais
    • Zastrozzi: A Romance
  • Henry David Thoreau, Walden
  • William Wordsworth, “My heart leaps up. . .“
  • Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life”
  • Sheridan Le Fanu, Uncle Silas, In a Glass Darkly
  • Bram Stoker, Dracula
  • Wagner, Tristan and Isolde
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