Song in the Novel - (Proceedings of the British Academy) by Jennifer Rushworth & Hannah Scott & Barry Ife (Hardcover)

About the Book

In Song in the Novel, scholars of literature, music, and culture explore the presence of songs and singing in novels, focusing on English, French, Italian, Russian, and Spanish examples from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries.

Book Synopsis

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.

About the Author

Jennifer Rushworth is Associate Professor in French and Comparative Literature at University College London. Her research interests span French and Italian literature and include mourning, medievalism, and music. She has written two monographs, Discourses of Mourning in Dante, Petrarch, and Proust and Petrarch and the Literary Culture of Nineteenth-Century France: Translation, Appropriation, Transformation, and has co-edited the volumes Mediating Vulnerability: Comparative Approaches and Questions of Genre and Dwelling on Grief: Narratives of Mourning Across Time and Forms. Her third monograph, Proust's Songbook, is forthcoming in 2024.

Hannah Scott is a NUAcT Research Fellow in French cultural history at Newcastle University. Her research interests include popular culture, music, dance, and performance, especially in the context of 19th-century France. She has published two monographs, Singing the English: Britain in the French Musical Lowbrow, 1870-1904 and, at the intersection of material culture and literature, Broken Glass, Broken World: Glass in French Culture in the Aftermath of 1870. Her current research explores the role of café-concert music in responding to experiences of disease, medicine, and public health in the era of Parisian café-concert and London music hall.

Barry Ife is a cultural historian specialising in early-modern Spain. He held the Cervantes Chair of Spanish at King's College London from 1988 to 2004, and from 2004 to 2017 was Principal of the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, where he is now a Research Professor. Since joining the Guildhall School, he has become interested in the performative aspects of prose fiction and is currently working on a book, Speaking Prose: The Power of the Voice in Cervantes, and directing the Leverhulme Trust 'Texting Scarlatti' project. He received a CBE in the 2000 Queen's Birthday Honours for services to Hispanic Studies, a knighthood in the 2017 New Year Honours for services to performing arts education, and in 2021 was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of Isabel la Católica.