Napoleon Symphony A Novel In Four Movements

Anthony Burgess draws on his love of music and history in this novel he called “elephantine fun” to write. A grand and affectionate tragicomic symphony to Napoleon Bonaparte that teases and reweaves Napoleon’s life into a pattern borrowed—in liberty, equality, and fraternity—from Beethoven’s Third “Eroica” Symphony, in this rich, exciting, bawdy, and funny novel Anthony Burgess has pulled out all the stops for a virtuoso performance that is literary, historical, and musical.

There is a strong tradition of literary analyses of the musical artwork. Simply put, all musicology - any writing about music - is an attempt at making analogies between what happens within the world of sound and language itself. This study considers this analogy from the opposite perspective: authors attempting to structure words using musical forms and techniques. It's a viewpoint much more rarely explored, and none of the extant studies of novelists' musical techniques have been done by musicians. Can a novel follow the form of a symphony and still succeed as a novel? Can musical counterpoint be mimicked by words on a page? Alan Shockley begins looking for answers by examining music's appeal for novelists, and then explores two brief works, a prose fugue by Douglas Hofstadter, and a short story by Anthony Burgess modeled after a Mozart symphony. Analyses of three large, emblematic attempts at musical writing follow. The much debated 'Sirens' episode of James Joyce's Ulysses, which the author famously likened to a fugue, Burgess' largely ignored Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements, patterned on Beethoven's Eroica, and Joyce's Finnegans Wake, which Shockley examines as an attempt at composing a fully musicalized language. After these three larger analyses, Shockley discusses two quite recent brief novels, William Gaddis' novella Agapgape and David Markson's This is not a novel, proposing that each of these confounding texts coheres elegantly when viewed as a musically-structured work. From the perspective of a composer, Shockley offers the reader fresh tools for approaching these dense and often daunting texts.

Celebrating the centenary of Anthony Burgess’s birth, this book reveals the true relation that the British author had with France. It brings together a collection of papers by a selected group of academics who explore the sizeable French literary and musical heritage that inspired Burgess in his creations and adaptations. It shows that the portrait of Anthony Burgess would be incomplete if the importance and influence of French literary and musical works on his career are not considered. Adopting a multifaceted approach, the book includes numerous in-depth analyses of Anthony Burgess’s works in reference to famous French writers, such as Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Lévi-Strauss, Molière, and Rostand, and French composers, including Berlioz, Bizet, Boulez, Debussy, Ravel, and Saint-Saëns. These artists, indeed French culture in general, left a profound and indelible mark on Anthony Burgess.

Patrice Gueniffey, the leading French historian of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic age, takes up the epic narrative at the heart of this turbulent period: the life of Napoleon himself, from his boyhood in Corsica, to his meteoric rise during the Italian and Egyptian campaigns, to his proclamation as Consul for Life in 1802.

Introducing Comparative Literature is a comprehensive guide to the field offering clear, concise information alongside useful analysis and examples. It frames the introduction within recent theoretical debates and shifts in the discipline whilst also addressing the history of the field and its practical application. Looking at Comparative Literature within the context of globalization, cosmopolitanism and post or transnationalism, the book also offers engagement and comparison with other visual media such as cinema and e-literature. The first four chapters address the broad theoretical issues within the field such as ‘interliterary theory’, decoloniality, and world literature, while the next four are more applied, looking at themes, translation, literary history and comparison with other arts. This engaging guide also contains a glossary of terms and concepts as well as a detailed guide to further reading.

The essays collected in this volume were initially presented at the Fifth International Conference on Consciousness, Theatre, Literature and the Arts, held at the University of Lincoln, June 15–17, 2013. The conference was organised on the basis of the success of its predecessors in 2005, 2007, 2009 and 2011, and on the basis of the success of the Rodopi book series Consciousness, Literature and the Arts, which has to date seen 34 volumes in print, with another 12 in press or in the process of being written. The 2013 conference and the book series highlight the continuing growth of interest within the interdisciplinary field of consciousness studies, and in the distinct disciplines of theatre studies, literary studies, film studies, fine arts and music in the relationship between the object of these disciplines and human consciousness. 35 delegates from 12 countries across the world attended the June 2013 conference in Lincoln; their range of disciplines and approaches is reflected well in this book.

This first book-length study of D. H. Lawrence’s lifelong engagement with music surveys his extensive musical interests and how these permeate his writing, while also situating Lawrence within a growing body of work on music and modernism. A twin focus considers the music that shaped Lawrence’s novels and poetry, as well as contemporary developments in music that parallel his quest for new forms of expression. Comparisons are made with the music of Debussy, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Wagner, and British composers, including Bax, Holst and Vaughan Williams, and with the musical writings of Forster, Hardy, Hueffer (Ford), Nietzsche and Pound. Above all, by exploring Lawrence and music in historical context, this study aims to open up new areas for study and a place for Lawrence within the field of music and modernism.