This one-day interdisciplinary postgraduate conference seeks to explore the myriad ways in which literature and music interact to construct meaning. In recent years, musicology has embraced new critical approaches, not least from literary theory and criticism, in order to understand music as constitutive of identity – gender, sexuality, nationality, race – and suggest radical ways in which music signifies through language and metaphor. These developments suggest that literary studies can continue to inform analysis of music in productive ways, while approaches from musicology can also stimulate fresh perspectives on literary works by prompting a reassessment of the way in which music functions in relation to the literary text.
