Reading Time in Music

This ambitious and original monograph offers a valuable contribution to the current reappraisal of literary periodization in the “long nineteenth century” through its focus on the relationship between gender and music across the genres of poetry and fiction. Exploring “non-linear music,” Sarah Cash participates in the scholarly movement to connect representations of gender with the subversion of Enlightenment binaries in nineteenth-century literature. In remarkably lucid prose, Cash informs this literary study with a coherent balance of theoretical models in musicology, literature, gender studies, and philosophy. -- Kathryn Freeman, University of Miami
Examining the destabilizing collision in 19th-century fiction of the stability (or fixity) of realism with “the fluidity of the unknown” in those disruptive narrative spaces where music intersects with temporality, Cash unfolds exciting new vistas on intellectual and aesthetic innovations of writers who glimpsed in music’s inherent resistance to empirical strictures a metaphor for challenging the limitations of the conventional narrative structures of mimetic realism—a means of unbinding narrative from its accumulated mimetic conventions. This is good stuff—important stuff, and well worth a careful read. -- Stephen Behrendt, University of Nebraska