ABSTRACT

Modern literature has always been obsessed by music. It cannot seem to think about itself without obsessing about music. And music has returned the favour. The Routledge Companion to Music and Modern Literature addresses this relationship as a significant contribution to the burgeoning field of word and music studies. The 37 chapters within consider the partnership through four lenses—the universal, opera and literature, musical and literary forms, and popular music and literature—and touch upon diverse and pertinent themes for our modern times, ranging from misogyny to queerness, racial inequality to the claimed universality of whiteness. This Companion therefore offers an essential resource for all who try to decode the musico-literary exchange.

part I|91 pages

Questioning the Universal

part II|94 pages

Opera and Literature

chapter 9|13 pages

Modern Fiction and Opera

Representing Interiority

chapter 10|14 pages

Trouble in Paradise

Colette's Claudine s'en va (1903) and the Problem of Writing about Wagner

chapter 11|15 pages

Pushkin in the Language of Exile

Arthur Lourié's Feast During the Plague

chapter 12|10 pages

Dialogues with Pushkin

From Tchaikovsky to Stravinsky and The Rake's Progress

chapter 13|17 pages

Of Sailors and Divas

Jean Cocteau's and Francis Poulenc's La Voix humaine

chapter 14|9 pages

Another Turn of the Screw

Enigma in Benjamin Britten and Henry James

chapter 15|14 pages

‘Tendernesses of an England Long Past'

Opera, Elegy, and the Music of Alan Hollinghurst

part III|132 pages

Musical Form, Literary Form

chapter 16|14 pages

Forming Time

Music, Literature, and Modernity

chapter 19|12 pages

Setting Music to Music

Mallarmé, Boulez and the Transformation of Thought

chapter 20|18 pages

Music Without Music

Kurt Schwitters's Ursonate

chapter 23|10 pages

Sound and Sense Interwoven

Aldous Huxley's Music of Ideas

chapter 25|10 pages

Coherence and Counterpoint

Music in the Modern Short Story

chapter 26|10 pages

The Muses of Noigandres

Music and Form in Brazilian Concrete Poetry

part IV|111 pages

Popular Music and Literature

chapter 28|11 pages

Jazz Fiction in Global Context

Between Racial Politics and Improvisational Poetics

chapter 29|11 pages

Literary Beethovens

Convention, Difference, and Cultural Memory

chapter 31|8 pages

Call-and-Response

Black Music and Literature, from Langston Hughes to Morgan Parker

chapter 32|10 pages

Confessional Poetry, Confessional Pop

Gender, Race, and the Lyric Form in Modern American Writing and Music

chapter 33|8 pages

Literary Pop

Dissecting the Creative Process Behind Maxïmo Park's ‘Leave This Island'

chapter 34|11 pages

Jawbreaker

Literary Punk and Authenticity

chapter 35|10 pages

The Devil's Party

Metal and Literature

chapter 36|10 pages

Setting Greek Modernist Poetry to Greek Popular Music

The Emergence of Art-Popular [Entechno Laiko] Song

chapter 37|8 pages

Performing Brecht's Paradox

Misuk as Critical Pop?