Chapter 9 of Rock and Romanticism: Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms: “Tales of the Female Lover: the Poetics of Desire in To Bring You My Love and Is This Desire?” (pp. 163-181) by Catherine Girodet, Ph.D. candidate Université Paul Valéry – Montpellier, and faculty, English Department, Universitie De Creteil.
- Chapter summary
- Returning to the female Gothic, Catherine Girodet’s “Tales of the Female Lover: the Poetics of Desire on To Bring You My Love and Is This Desire?” begins with the groundwork laid down by Mario Praz in The Romantic Agony and then continued by Abrams and Henderson and others in her exploration of dark Romantic themes in the music of P.J. Harvey. Girodet is particularly interested in the agonies of romantic love as formulated in Harvey’s third and fourth albums, which represent a change in musical direction for Harvey and her first forays into Romanticism. She also explores the implications of Harvey’s music for our consideration of the relationship between the Gothic and the Romantic and how in Harvey’s music the agony of love serves as a conduit to the sublime.
- Music
- PJ Harvey
- “To Bring You My Love”
- “Is This Desire?”
- “Dress”
- “Rid of Me”
- “Reeling”
- “Long Snake Moan”
- “I Think I’m a Mother”
- “Meet Ze Mostra”
- “White Chalk”
- “Angelene”
- “Send His Love To Me”
- “Teclo”
- “C’mon Billy”
- “Catherine”
- “The Dancer”
- “The Sky Lit Up”
- “The Garden”
- “The River”
- “Down By The Water”
- “No Girl So Sweet”
- “Let England Shake”
- PJ Harvey
- Literature
- Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- John Keats, Letter to Reynolds 3 May 1818
- Byron
- William Hazlitt, Liber Amoris
- Percy Bysshe Shelley, “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery“
- Charlotte Smith, “Sonnet XXI: Supposed to be Written by Werther”
- Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful
- William Wordsworth, The Excursion
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The Philosophy of Contemporary Song 