The First Page: Song in the Novel
THE FIRST PAGE
Song in the Novel
by Jennifer Rushworth, Hannah Scott and Barry Ife
4 October 2024
The First Page presents the first page of books that are launched as part of the IAS Book Launch Programme. On 8 October 2024, Jennifer Rushworth, Hannah Scott and Barry Ife launch their edited volume Song in the Novel that investigates the variety of types of songs present in novels and their function, considering its importance for plot, character, and setting.
Introduction
THE CHAPTERS IN this book consider a specific intermedial phenomenon, that of the presence and invocation of songs and singing in novels. Throughout, we embrace the necessary multiplicity of the term ‘song’, whose definition ranges from the specific to the general, comprising any ‘piece of music for voice or voices, whether accompanied or unaccompanied’ or more broadly ‘the act or art of singing’.1 Our volume accordingly investigates the significance of different songs and acts of singing as narrated in novels from the 17th to the 21st centuries. Our examples are taken from a range of languages – in particular, French, English, Italian, Spanish, and Russian – and from a wide range of different forms and genres of song, including romances, ballads, folk songs, opera and opéra-comique, café-concert repertoire, jazz, and blues. Our approach to song is open and eclectic and embraces all these different manifestations of song in the novel. We understand song both in general as an act of singing on the part of one or more characters and in the more historical, linguistic, and generic terms appropriate to specific instances of song involved in each case. This diversity of sung materials is united around the fundamental questions: what is the role, function, and effect of song in the novel?
JENNIFER RUSHWORTH is Associate Professor in French and Comparative Literature at Ucl. Her research interests include mourning, medievalism, and music. Proust’s Songbook is her third monograph.
BARRY IFE was Principal of Guildhall School from September 2004 to January 2017, and is now an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the School. He specialises in the cultural history of Spain and Spanish America from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries.
HANNAH SCOTT is an Academic Track fellow at the School of Modern Languages, Newcastle University. Her current project explores the role of popular music in communicating and responding to experiences of disease, medicine, and public health in the era of Parisian café-concert and London music hall.
The book launch will take place on 8 October 2024 at the Institute of Advanced Studies. More information.
Lead Image: Olga Brajnovic via Unsplash.
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