Professor Pierre Dubois, author of Music in the Georgian Novel (2015), will deliver
a lecture "Music and the Georgian Novel, or the Divorce of Adam and Eve."
In Laurence Sterne and the Origins of the Musical Novel (1978), William Freedman argued that Tristram Shandy was a fundamentally ‘musical’ novel that borrowed not only metaphors, but also structural elements, from the art of music. While other writers, such as Werner Wolf, reduce the so-called musicalization of Tristram Shandy to only a few elements amounting at best to some ‘dubious “metaphorical impressionism”,’ it can nevertheless be reasonably admitted that Sterne’s ground-breaking novel inaugurated a new era in the way music was mentioned, referred to and used in the eighteenth-century English novel. The growing importance of musical allusions in late eighteenth-century novels paralleled, and corresponded to, the rise of the so-called ‘age of sensibility’ and the ‘sentimental’ tide. [full abstract here]
