Thesis Title: The Composer and Musical Identities in Nineteenth-Century Fiction
Supervisor: Prof. Susan Jones
My thesis spans the nineteenth century, taking in primarily English-language novels (George Eliot's Daniel Deronda and George du Maurier's Trilby) with supplementary material from across Europe. My range of critical approaches includes celebrity theory, nationalism, Orientalism and studies of Jewishness, gender, theories of genius, and evolution and degeneration. My approach is interdisciplinary, combining literary criticism with musicology, employing an understanding of music both as an aesthetic force within the novel and as a historical context interacting with the production of the novel.
Topics on which I have presented at conferences include: late-nineteenth-century female composer novels; the interaction between the music and writing of Ethel Smyth; memorial texts about Frédéric Chopin and Felix Mendelssohn; Romantic reputations in romans a clef featuring composers in mid-nineteenth-century France, 'queer listening' in late-nineteenth-century novels; the popular/classical divide in Trilby; the valorisation of music in British national culture in the late nineteenth century and present day; Wagnerism's influence on (and in) novels by Oscar Wilde and George Moore; decadence in the little-known novel The Mirror of Music by Stanley Makower; and Amy Levy's response to Daniel Deronda's Jewish musicians.
At Oxford, I have led seminars and tutorials on Prelims Paper 3: Literature in English 1830-1910; was a graduate teaching assistant on the FHS Paper 6 module 'Writing Lives'; and taught a series of tutorials on George Eliot. I am currently teaching tutorials on Oscar Wilde and on queer theory and literature.
Publications:
'Between Nationalism, Transnationalism, and Cosmopolitanism in Daniel Deronda’s Klesmer', Romance, Revolution and Reform, 4 (January 2022), pp. 58-80. Available here.
'Listening from the Outside: Musical Performance and Queer Displacement in Teleny and Trilby', Oxford Research in English, 14 (Autumn 2022), pp. 52-74. Available here.
