Full Description
Song in the Novel investigates the variety of types of songs present in novels, from French romances, ballads, folk songs, opera, and opéra-comique, to café-concert music, blues and jazz, and more recent popular music. Throughout, literary scholars, musicologists, and cultural historians analyse novels written in a range of languages, including English, French, Italian, Russian, and Spanish. Using a range of interdisciplinary and comparative material, Song in the Novel explores the way that songs can be present in novels, from the inclusion of musical scores to broader practices of citation and allusion. It interrogates the function of song in the novel, considering its importance for plot, character, and setting. Finally, it addresses the reader's involvement in these songs — whether through immediate recognition or further research — with the result that they may participate in what Lawrence Kramer describes as a 'song pact' with the author, akin to the intimate connections between characters enabled through song in the novel.
Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1: CATRIONA SETH: 'Elle se mit à chanter...': A Reflection on Songs in 18th-Century French Fiction
2: MARTIN WÅLHBERG: Integrating Song in the Novel: Lessons from the 18th Century
3: C. M. JACKSON-HOULSTON: 'A Taste for Music, or No'? Walter Scott's Novels and Music
4: CORMAC NEWARK: Singing in Instalments: Giuseppe Rovani's Cento anni (1856-64)
5: BARRY IFE: Carmen's Intertexts: Cervantes, Viardot, Mérimée, Bizet
6: HANNAH SCOTT: Songs in the Laundry: Musical Meaning in Zola's L'Assommoir
7: JOSH TORABI: Re-Joycing in Song: Love, Death, and Nationhood in Ulysses
8: PHILIP ROSS BULLOCK: 'Extraordinary how potent cheap music is': Memory, Nostalgia, and Affect in Gaito Gazdanov's An Evening with Claire
9: HANNAH HUXLEY: Songs of Triumph: Claude McKay, Sonic Subcultures, and the Opéra-Comique
10: ELIZABETH EVA LEACH: Singing the Dead Present: Reading Ali Smith's Winter in the Middle Ages
Afterword. The Song Pact: How the Novel Sings
Bibliography
Index
