Reflections on Music in Fiction: Rose Tremain’s Music and Silence (1999), Julian Barnes’s The Noise of Time (2016) and Roger Scruton’s Perictione in Colophon (2000)
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Jarmila Mildorf
Abstract
Music and literature are sister arts whose affinities and intertwinement over time have been explored from musicological and literary studies perspectives. Music holds great fascination with both scholars and lay persons because it manages to move us deeply even if we do not know much about it in a technical or theoretical sense. Aesthetic theories of music have time and again assigned this art form a special, sometimes even a divine, status. This article explores some ways in which contemporary novels reflect on music as an art form and cultural practice, its personal as well as political significance. It investigates how such reflection about music is embedded in the narrative texts, either as narratorial comments which momentarily suspend the action or as thoughts and opinions expressed by characters. In each case, readers are invited to follow the often deeply philosophical lines of reasoning presented in the text and to form their own ideas. Musical ekphrasis is used to convey at least a fleeting impression of the ephemeral ‘texture’ of the respective music and its lasting effects on the novels’ characters.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: Abstract Reflection in Contemporary Fiction
- “A Bridge is an Utterance”: Abstract Reasoning in Adrian Duncan’s A Sabbatical in Leipzig
- The Mercurial Effects of Abstract Reflection: Troubling Hegemonic Cultures of Knowledge in Ted Chiang’s Short Math Fiction and Richard Powers’s Maximalist Arboreal Novel
- Reflections on Music in Fiction: Rose Tremain’s Music and Silence (1999), Julian Barnes’s The Noise of Time (2016) and Roger Scruton’s Perictione in Colophon (2000)
- Riddling Word Games and Biblical Allusions in “Against a Wen”
- Laughing at Vampire Novels: Gothic Horror, Teen Girl Agency, and the Old and New Northanger Abbey
- Jean Rhys’s Cocktails and the Blurring of Literary Meridians
- Post-Postfeminist Witnessing: Sexual Violence and 9/11 in Claire Vaye Watkins’s “Rondine Al Nido”
- Reviews
- Todd Preston. 2022. A Handbook of Animals in Old English Texts. Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, Leeds, i + 199 pp., £107.00 | $129.00.
- Sarah Wood. 2022. Piers Plowman and its Manuscript Tradition. York; Woodbridge: York Medieval Press; Boydell Press. York Manuscript and Early Print Studies 5. xiv + 234 pp., 6 illus., £80.00 | $115.00 Hardcover, £24.99 | $29.95 Ebook.
- Jessie Hock. 2021. The Erotics of Materialism: Lucretius and Early Modern Poetics. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 234 pp., $59.95.
- Mario Klarer (ed.). 2022. Barbary Captives: An Anthology of Early Modern Slave Memoirs by Europeans in North Africa. New York: Columbia University Press, 416 pp., 35 illustr., $35.00.
- Julia Nitz. 2020. Belles and Poets: Intertextuality in the Civil War Diaries of White Southern Women. Southern Literary Studies Series. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 296 pp., $55.00.
- Sämi Ludwig, Astrid Starck-Adler and André Karliczek (eds.). 2022. Colors and Cultures: Interdisciplinary Explorations / Couleurs et Cultures: Explorations Interdisciplinaires. Jena: Salana, 364 pp., €30.84.
- Matthew Clark and James Phelan. 2020. Debating Rhetorical Narratology: On the Synthetic, Mimetic, and Thematic Aspects of Narrative. Theory and Interpretation of Narrative. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 256 pp., $99.95.
- Books Reviewed: Anglia 141 (2023)
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: Abstract Reflection in Contemporary Fiction
- “A Bridge is an Utterance”: Abstract Reasoning in Adrian Duncan’s A Sabbatical in Leipzig
- The Mercurial Effects of Abstract Reflection: Troubling Hegemonic Cultures of Knowledge in Ted Chiang’s Short Math Fiction and Richard Powers’s Maximalist Arboreal Novel
- Reflections on Music in Fiction: Rose Tremain’s Music and Silence (1999), Julian Barnes’s The Noise of Time (2016) and Roger Scruton’s Perictione in Colophon (2000)
- Riddling Word Games and Biblical Allusions in “Against a Wen”
- Laughing at Vampire Novels: Gothic Horror, Teen Girl Agency, and the Old and New Northanger Abbey
- Jean Rhys’s Cocktails and the Blurring of Literary Meridians
- Post-Postfeminist Witnessing: Sexual Violence and 9/11 in Claire Vaye Watkins’s “Rondine Al Nido”
- Reviews
- Todd Preston. 2022. A Handbook of Animals in Old English Texts. Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, Leeds, i + 199 pp., £107.00 | $129.00.
- Sarah Wood. 2022. Piers Plowman and its Manuscript Tradition. York; Woodbridge: York Medieval Press; Boydell Press. York Manuscript and Early Print Studies 5. xiv + 234 pp., 6 illus., £80.00 | $115.00 Hardcover, £24.99 | $29.95 Ebook.
- Jessie Hock. 2021. The Erotics of Materialism: Lucretius and Early Modern Poetics. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 234 pp., $59.95.
- Mario Klarer (ed.). 2022. Barbary Captives: An Anthology of Early Modern Slave Memoirs by Europeans in North Africa. New York: Columbia University Press, 416 pp., 35 illustr., $35.00.
- Julia Nitz. 2020. Belles and Poets: Intertextuality in the Civil War Diaries of White Southern Women. Southern Literary Studies Series. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 296 pp., $55.00.
- Sämi Ludwig, Astrid Starck-Adler and André Karliczek (eds.). 2022. Colors and Cultures: Interdisciplinary Explorations / Couleurs et Cultures: Explorations Interdisciplinaires. Jena: Salana, 364 pp., €30.84.
- Matthew Clark and James Phelan. 2020. Debating Rhetorical Narratology: On the Synthetic, Mimetic, and Thematic Aspects of Narrative. Theory and Interpretation of Narrative. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 256 pp., $99.95.
- Books Reviewed: Anglia 141 (2023)
