Novel Sounds: Southern Fiction in the Age of Rock and Roll

Florence Dore

Published by Columbia University Press 2018

Novel Sounds

Southern Fiction in the Age of Rock and Roll

Florence Dore

https://doi.org/10.7312/dore18522

Overview
Contents

About this book

Novel 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.

Author / Editor information

Florence Dore is professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is the author of The Novel and the Obscene: Sexual Subjects in American Modernism (2005). Her rock album Perfect City was released on Slewfoot Records (2001).

Reviews

Kate Marshall, University of Notre Dame:
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.

Jennifer Fleissner, Indiana University-Bloomington:
In 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.

Eric Lott, author of Black Mirror: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism:
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.

Greil Marcus:
This is an original and subtle book, with punk-rock ricochets.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	ix
INTRODUCTION: MINSTREL REALISM AT THE BIRTH OF ROCK Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. FUGITIVES AND FUTILITY: AGRARIAN BALLAD NOVELS IN BOB DYLAN’S MOMENT Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	33
2. NEW CRITICAL NOISE IN MUSIC CITY: THOMAS PYNCHON’S WILLIAM FAULKNER Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	57
3. THE BALLAD’S GENDER: FEMININITY AND INFORMATION IN GEORGIA Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	77
4. THE LEAD BELLY THING: WILLIAM STYRON’S RECORDS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	95
CODA. NOBEL SOUNDS: BOB DYLAN’S NOVEL PRIZE Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	115
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	123
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	155
Discography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	167
Filmography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	169
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	171

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Illustrations
- Other: 6 black and white images

eBook

Published: September 24, 2018
ISBN: 9780231546058