Reading Time in Music: Temporally Vexed

by Sarah Cash

Overview

This book examines the intersection of music and temporality in British literature of the long nineteenth century, arguing the temporal multiplicity of music as the most dynamic way to subvert mimetic bias. Temporally vexed sound spaces rupture the narrative, transgressing the hegemonic structures to which it is subject.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781666903492
Publisher:	Lexington Books
Publication date:	03/31/2023
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	6.21(w) x 9.32(h) x 0.79(d)

About the Author

Sarah Cash is lecturer in the Department of Writing Studies at the University of Miami.

Table of Contents

Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1: Out of Time: Music as Temporal Excess in Thomas De Quincey’s “Dream Fugue.” Chapter 2: Lamenting Ruin: Irish Musical Mourning in Sydney Owenson’s Wild Irish Girl. Chapter 3: Broken Boundaries: Disruptive Sound Spaces in William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. Chapter 4: A Singing Call: Death and Music Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend. Chapter 5: Distant Music: Temporal Disruption in James Joyce’s Dubliners Conclusion: Coda: Re-imaging Ourselves in Time References Index

Editorial Reviews

This ambitious and original monograph offers a valuable contribution to the current reappraisal of literary periodization in the “long nineteenth century” through its focus on the relationship between gender and music across the genres of poetry and fiction. Exploring “non-linear music,” Sarah Cash participates in the scholarly movement to connect representations of gender with the subversion of Enlightenment binaries in nineteenth-century literature. In remarkably lucid prose, Cash informs this literary study with a coherent balance of theoretical models in musicology, literature, gender studies, and philosophy.

Kathryn Freeman

Examining the destabilizing collision in 19th-century fiction of the stability (or fixity) of realism with “the fluidity of the unknown” in those disruptive narrative spaces where music intersects with temporality, Cash unfolds exciting new vistas on intellectual and aesthetic innovations of writers who glimpsed in music’s inherent resistance to empirical strictures a metaphor for challenging the limitations of the conventional narrative structures of mimetic realism—a means of unbinding narrative from its accumulated mimetic conventions. This is good stuff—important stuff, and well worth a careful read.

Stephen Behrendt