The Sonification of Modernist Fiction: A Critical Review

This chapter contextualizes the historical and aesthetic era of high modernist fiction (1918–1939) by focusing specifically on its multimodal and sonorous qualities. It briefly discusses some major conceptualizations and taxonomies created in the intermedial field of musico-literary theory. This is followed by a summary and discussion of a selection of general musico-literary criticism that focuses on literary texts from the modernist era. This section transitions into a summary of the musico-literary analytical landscape surrounding three modernist authors: Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Thomas Mann. The overall aim of the chapter is to identify the different perspectives, methodologies, and concerns that can be found in the vast body of musico-modernist-literary criticism and locate some of the major tendencies in these intermedial ventures.