Mark the Music. The Language of Music in English Literature from Shakespeare to Salman Rushdie

Mark the Music responds to Bakhtin’s invitation to look to one language through the eyes (and ears) of another, offering a musical reading of some key moments and experiences relating to the world of English literature through the works of Shakespeare, Wilde, Joyce, Eliot, Woolf, Larkin, MacInnes, Brathwaite, Johnson, Kureishi, Parsons, Hornby, Sylvian and Rushdie. Music here is seen as an extremely complex and multifaceted phenomenon: it is addressed as pure sound, which is of paramount importance in our perception of poetry, as discourse, which helps us understand the rich dialogism which nourishes both drama and fiction (which, in their turn, very often resemble music, resonating of its iconicity), and as a widely-shared (and fundamental) social practice from Shakespeare’s time to the present age.