Reading Time in Music

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.

In this book, Sarah Cash examines the intersection of music and temporality in British literature of the long nineteenth century. The sound spaces created at these intersections function as antimimetic resistance to hegemonic structures. Through its temporal multiplicity, music resonates in excess of linear time, revealing a metaphoric soundedness in the text that subverts reader expectation and reveals how seemingly realist nineteenth-century novels transgress the limitations of their classic narratological structures. In even the most apparently "realist" texts, the most extravagant, excessive, and hyperbolic elements exceed the bounds of what we often consider real, disrupting mimetic bias. Cash argues that music offers the most dynamic way to expose this vexed temporality in the text. Through scholarly intervention a disruption of historic classifications show that Victorians are heirs of Romanticism’s musical ideals, including the power of music to penetrate and transform space and time and the permanence of sound as it reverberates beyond human perception. Scholars of nineteenth-century literature, temporality, and gender studies will find this book of particular interest.

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