Description
Book SynopsisNovel Sounds shows how Southern writers turned to rock music and its technologies—tape, radio, vinyl—to develop the “rock novel.” Florence Dore considers the work of writers like William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and William Styron alongside Bessie Smith, Lead Belly, and Bob Dylan to uncover deep historical links between rock and literature.
Trade ReviewThis is an original and subtle book, with punk-rock ricochets. -- Greil Marcus
Every chapter of
Novel Sounds works at a high and steady pitch of intelligence and cogency. Florence Dore's work teems with rich archival unearthings and interpretive ingenuity. Dore’s intricate connections, juxtapositions, and analyses of multimedia interanimation are never less than absorbing and are often eye-opening both at the level of textual forms and in the larger terms of cultural understanding in which they were embedded. -- Eric Lott, author of
Black Mirror: The Cultural Contradictions of American RacismIn Florence Dore's electrifying, genre-busting tour de force, the mid-twentieth-century inventors of literary formalism, tracing poetic tradition to the ballad form, inadvertently open literature's floodgates to encompass the bold 'novel sounds' of rock 'n' roll. Southern fiction, no less than American culture, would never be the same. -- Jennifer Fleissner, Indiana University-Bloomington
Novel Sounds is a brilliantly literary account of rock and roll and American culture. From Lead Belly at the MLA to Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize, Dore demonstrates how profoundly and unexpectedly entwined our literary histories are with their sonic media. She ensures we’ll never listen to a ballad or read a novel from the era in the same way again. -- Kate Marshall, University of Notre Dame
In
Novel Sounds, Dore is interested in how a mass cultural phenomenon like rock 'n' roll can help illuminate realities about institutionalized high culture. Beginning with the case of Lead Belly, she traces the low and high cultural currents that the folk singer helped set in motion, specifically the mass popularization of Southern black music as 'rock 'n' roll' and the intellectual enthusiasm for folk ballads. -- Max McKenna * PopMatters *
A stimulating addition to the literature on southern American fiction. * Choice *
A pleasing option for readers who enjoy celebrated music writers like [Greil] Marcus or Peter Guralnick. * Chapter 16 *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction. Minstrel Realism at the Birth of Rock
1. Fugitives and Futility: Agrarian Ballad Novels in Bob Dylan’s Moment
2. New Critical Noise in Music City: Thomas Pynchon’s William Faulkner
3. The Ballad’s Gender: Femininity and Information in Georgia
4. The Lead Belly Thing: William Styron’s Records
Coda. Nobel Sounds: Bob Dylan’s Novel Prize
Notes
Bibliography
Discography
Filmography
Index
