Essays on Music and Language in Modernist Literature
Musical Modernism
- 296 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About This Book
This volume explores the role of music as a source of inspiration and provocation for modernist writers. In its consideration of modernist literature within a broad political, postcolonial, and internationalist context, this book is an important intervention in the growing field of Words and Music studies. It expands the existing critical debate to include lesser-known writers alongside Joyce, Woolf, and Beckett, a wide-ranging definition of modernism, and the influence of contemporary music on modernist writers. From the rhythm of Tagore's poetry to the influence of jazz improvisation, the tonality of traditional Irish music to the operas of Wagner, these essays reframe our sense of how music inspired Literary Modernism. Exploring the points at which the art forms of music and literature collide, repel, and combine, contributors draw on their deep musical knowledge to produce close readings of prose, poetry, and drama, confronting the concept of what makes writing "musical." In doing so, they uncover commonalities: modernist writers pursue simultaneity and polyphony, evolve the leitmotif for literary purposes, and adapt the formal innovations of twentieth-century music. The essays explore whether it is possible for literature to achieve that unity of form and subject which music enjoys, and whether literary texts can resist paraphrase, can be simply themselves. This book demonstrates how attention to the role of music in text in turn illuminates the manner in which we read literature.
Frequently asked questions
Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Half Title
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Table of Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Woolf Rewriting Wagner: The Waves and Der Ring des Nibelungen
- 2 âThatâs the Music of the Futureâ: Joyce, Modernism, and the âOld Irish Tonalityâ
- 3 The Ring, The Waves, and the Wake: Eternal Recurrence in Wagner, Woolf, and Joyce
- 4 Musicality in Ford Madox Fordâs Paradeâs End: Towards Modernity
- 5 The (R)Evolution of Olive Moore: Fugue as Bridge to a New Feminist Awakening
- 6 A Strict Arrangement: Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, and the Kretzschmar Lectures
- 7 Sounding Bodies: Eroticized Music-Making in Proustâs Ă la Recherche
- 8 Rabindranath Tagore and Musical Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century Bengal
- 9 Words for Music Perhaps: W. B. Yeats, Music, and Meaninglessness
- 10 âThe Way to Learn the Music of Verse Is to Listen to Itâ: Ezra Poundâs the Pisan Cantos and the âSequence of the Musical Phraseâ
- 11 Imagismâs Musical Sympathies: Amy Lowell and Claude Debussy
- 12 Expansive Musical Modernism in William Carlos Williams, Steve Reich, and Tom Leonard
- 13 The Sudden Thing of Being No One: Robert Creeleyâs Rhythm Changes
- 14 âWith all that Tutti and Continuoâ: Musicality and Temporality in Djuna Barnesâs The Antiphon
- 15 âThe Blues Always Been Hereâ: African American Music and Black Modernism in August Wilsonâs Ma Raineyâs Black Bottom
- 16 The Musicalization of Samuel Beckett
- Bibliography
- Index