New Books In Music

The Musical Novel: Imitation of Musical Structure, Performance, and Reception in Contemporary Fiction (Camden House, 2014; a new paperback edition has recently come out (Boydell and Brewer, 2018)) examines a variety of music and literature interconnections. Readers are invited to ask what these collaborations that arise at the crossing points of various fields offer for engaging in reading and writing. Relying on an extensive overview of theoretical works that substantiate the overlapping of disciplines, Emily Petermann’s research provides additional coordinates for the definition of intermediality that underpins her examination of novels that embrace music. As the title of the book suggests, Petermann considers multiple ways in which music is incorporated in literature: structure, performance, and reception. An extensive segment of this research is devoted to the discussion of musical structures that writers bring to their texts. In this regard, Petermann takes a step forward in the examination of music and