Write in Tune: Contemporary Music in Fiction

Description

Contemporary popular music provides the soundtrack for a host of recent novels, but little critical attention has been paid to the intersection of these important art forms. Write in Tune addresses this gap by offering the first full-length study of the relationship between recent music and fiction. With essays from an array of international scholars, the collection focuses on how writers weave rock, punk, and jazz into their narratives, both to develop characters and themes and to investigate various fan and celebrity cultures surrounding contemporary music. Write in Tune covers major writers from America and England, including Don DeLillo, Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith, and Jim Crace. But it also explores how popular music culture is reflected in postcolonial, Latino, and Australian fiction. Ultimately, the book brings critical awareness to the power of music in shaping contemporary culture, and offers new perspectives on central issues of gender, race, and national identity.

Erich Hertz is Associate Professor of English at Siena College, USA. Jeffrey Roessner is Full Professor of English and Dean of Arts and Humanities at Mercyhurst University, USA.

Write in Tune is an invaluable assemblage of what the editors rightly call the "stunning" range of recent novels by major figures-including Don DeLillo, Jonathan Franzen, Hanif Kureishi, and Salman Rushdie-that reference contemporary music. The "rock novel" was once among the weakest of genres; this collection, at once accessible and sophisticated, is a major contribution in consolidating the array of writers who have elevated the genre into the highest precincts of literature. The excitement offered by Write in Tune gives one hope that the decline in the number of English majors might be reversed-I'll certainly be constructing a course out of it. * Neil Nehring, Associate Professor, University of Texas at Austin, USA, and author of Flowers in the Dustbin: Culture, Anarchy, and Postwar England * Write in Tune arrives at just the right time-as the rock novel has attained its maturity, and demands respect on its own terms-and demands as well its own forms of attention. The broad spectrum of essays included here, and the wide range of their approaches, provides a wealth of strategies for those of us who love this fiction. -- Kevin J.H. Dettmar, W.M. Keck Professor and Chair of English, Pomona College, USA Neither the novel nor pop music is dead, and they are experiencing a symbiotic relationship as evidenced in these 17 essays, which take up punk, grunge, jazz, rock, R and B, and Hispanic music, and the close relationship that has developed during the past 60 years between people, music, and a new genre--the rock novel [...] Write in Tune sets the stage and offers compelling evidence as to why the rock novel and the musical influences it encompasses should have a place in the literary canon. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. -- T. Emery, Austin Peay State University * CHOICE *