Music in Contemporary British Fiction: Listening to the Novel [Hardcover]

Alongside readings of modern novels (including work by David Mitchell, Zadie Smith, Jackie Kay and Andrew O'Hagan), Gerry Smyth offers an extended theoretical analysis of the relationship between music and fiction, as well as a critical overview of the role played by music in the canon of British fiction since the eighteenth century.Introduction: Listening to the Novel 'All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music': The Music-Novel in Theory and Practice The Role and Representation of Music in the Novel from Lawrence Sterne to Anthony Burgess 'It Ain't What You Do...': Musical Genre in the Novel '...It's the Way That You Do It!': Music and the Genres of Fiction The Uses of Music in the Contemporary British Novel Notes Bibliography

'The uses of music within fiction are legion, and Gerry Smyth provides a fascinating overview of ways in which writers invoke the musical Examples... are drawn from the 18th century onwards and include some fascinating insights: Smyth's reading of Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure as a Wagnerian novel - structured through leitmotifs - is particularly striking.'

- Andrew Blake, Times Higher Education

GERRY SMYTH is Reader in Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University, UK. He has published widely on the literature and music of Britain and Ireland. His previous books include The Novel and the Nation (1997), Space and the Cultural Imagination (2001) and Noisy Island: A Short History of Irish Popular Music (2005).