The Routledge Companion to Music and Modern Literature

Questioning the Universal

1. The Universal: Now You See It, Now You Don’t

2. Music, Literature, and the Aesthetics of Eugenics

3. ‘That is the music which makes men mad’: Hungarian Nervous Music in Fin-de-Siècle Gay Literature

4. Music and Gender Roles in Hector Berlioz’s Euphonia and George Sand’s Le Dernier Amour

5. Re-writing Music Lyrics as Resistant Poetry in Tyehima Jess’s Olio and Morgan Parker’s There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé

6. On Themes and Variations: Music and Literature in Poststructuralism

7. Towards Spirit: Samuel Beckett’s Phenomenology of Music

8. Music in Postcolonial Literature

9. Modern Fiction and Opera: Representing Interiority

10. Trouble in Paradise: Colette’s Claudine s’en va (1903) and the Problem of Writing about Wagner

11. Pushkin in the Language of Exile: Arthur Lourier’s The Feast During the Plague

12. Dialogues with Pushkin: From Tchaikovsky to Stravinsky and The Rake’s Progress

13. Of Sailors and Divas: Jean Cocteau’s and Francis Poulenc’s La Voix humaine

14. Another Turn of the Screw: Enigma in Benjamin Britten and Henry James

15. ‘Tenderness of an England Long Past’: Opera, Elegy, and the Music of Alan Hollinghurst

16. Forming Time: Music, Literature, and Modernity

17. Formal Innovations and The Idea of Music in French Poetry, 1850-1900

18. Music and the Illusions of Form

19. Setting Music to Music: Mallarmé, Boulez, and the Transformation of Thought

20. Music Without Music – Kurt Schwitters’s Ursonate

21. Form and Music in Modern Chinese Poetry

22. Variation Form in Virginia Woolf’s Fiction and Nonfiction

23. Sound and Sense Interwoven: Aldous Huxley’s Music of Ideas

24. Music as Content, Form, and Metaphor in Hermann Hesse’s Castalian Utopia

25. Coherence and Counterpoint: Music in the Modern Short Story

26. The Muses of Noigandres: Music and Form in Brazilian Concrete Poetry

27. ‘Booklovers’? Popular Music and the Literary Canon

28. Jazz Fiction in Global Context: Between Racial Politics and Improvisational Poetics

29. Literary Beethovens: Convention, Difference, and Cultural Memory

30. Dusty’s Answer, or, Pop Song for Ali Smith

31. Call-and-Response: Black Music and Literature, from Langston Hughes to Morgan Parker

32. Confessional Poetry, Confessional Pop: Gender, Race, and the Lyric Form in Modern American Writing and Music

33. Literary Pop: Dissecting the Creative Process Behind Maxïmo Park’s ‘Leave This Island’

34. Jawbreaker: Literary Punk and Authenticity

35. The Devil’s Party: Metal and Literature

36. Setting Greek Modernist Poetry to Greek Popular Music: The Emergence of Art-Popular [Entechno Laiko] Song

37. Performing Brecht’s Paradox: Misuk as Critical Pop?

Biography

Rachael Durkin is Senior Lecturer in Music in the Department of Humanities at Northumbria University.

Peter Dayan is Honorary Professorial Fellow in Word and Music Studies at the University of Edinburgh. From 2014 to 2019, he was also Obel Visiting Professor at the University of Aalborg in Denmark.

Axel Englund is Professor of Literature and Wallenberg Academy Fellow in the Department of Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University.

Katharina Clausius is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Intermedial Studies in the Département de littératures et de langues du monde at the Université de Montréal.

This book is an important and very welcome addition to the rapidly-expanding area of word and music studies. Both ‘literature’ and ‘music’ are interpreted very broadly to include a wide ranging array of discussions in which the creative tension between these two signifying systems is explored. The notion of the universal in music is problematized, followed by a broad investigation of disparate musical forms, ranging from opera to heavy metal, with an equally broad range of literature. The thirty seven contributors come from a large variety of disciplinary backgrounds and provide a fascinating contemporary snapshot of word and music studies.　

Dr Michael Halliwell, Associate Professor Vocal Studies and Opera, University of Sydney Conservatorium of Music President, International Association for Word and Music Studies

 

‘This volume will be of immense value to scholars and students of modern music and modern literature as well as to those with interdisciplinary interests. It also has much to offer readers with wide-ranging theoretical interests in issues of modernity. As a whole, the volume contributes significantly to current conversations about music and literature - severally and in combination - and to wider conversations about the importance of the arts and humanities. Collectively, the chapters in this book offer a fertile and compelling exploration of key questions of music and modernity.’

Delia DaSousa