STANFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
  
Cover of Beethoven’s Kiss by Kevin Kopelson
Beethoven’s Kiss
Pianism, Perversion, and the Mastery of Desire
Kevin Kopelson


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1996
212 pages.
$28.00

Paperback ISBN: 9780804725989

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Reviews

In Beethoven's Kiss, Kevin Kopelson takes you on a journey through a unique literary style which is both scholarly and meditative. It interweaves the issues of gender, sexuality and erotic romanticism and presents them against the backdrop of romantic pianism. Exploring quasi-sexual myths of the nineteenth century, Beethoven's Kiss takes a long look at the origin and consequences of those myths.

About the author

Kevin Kopelson is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Iowa and the author of Love's Litany: The Writing of Modern Homoerotics (Stanford, l994). He trained as a classical pianist at the Juilliard school of music.

"Beethoven's Kiss is a beguiling, insightful, sometimes funny, sometimes moving study. The book is put together performatively, as a memoir-meditation, rather than a piece of traditional scholarship. But its tacit scholarly backing is solid and up to date, and its unorthodox form is under the control of a finely tuned prose style."

—Lawrence Kramer, Fordham University