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, but including supplementary material from across Europe) featuring composers as characters. My range of critical approaches includes celebrity theory, nationalism, Orientalism and studies of Jewishness, gender, theories of genius, and evolution and degeneration. The thesis traces Romanticism's transformation, across the century, towards protomodernism through writing about music and musicians. 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. I graduated in July 2023.
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 series of tutorials on George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, and 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.
'An "incongruous bill of fare": Musical Canons and Copies in George du Maurier's Trilby', Cambridge Quarterly 52, 1 (March 2023), pp. 1-17. Available here.
'Listening Queerly to Teleny and Trilby', English Studies in Canada 42 (2-4) (2020), pp. 161-80. Available here.
